


Flip the Switch

by Rainne



Series: To Live Without the Sun [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Hydra (Marvel), Kidnapping, Multi, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Thor: The Dark World Compliant, Past Brainwashing, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-06 17:43:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20510954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: Once, while briefly in possession of an alien scepter of unknown power, Tony Stark decided that hooking said scepter up to a computer and using it to build an AI was a good idea.Spoiler alert: it was a bad idea.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Surprise, bitches! I bet you thought you'd seen the last of this series!

PROLOGUE

A few days later, Tony demands her presence in his lab.

She strolls out that direction and sticks her head in the door. "I was busy, Stark," she tells him shortly. "What do you want?"

"I want you to _see _what I've _invented, _" he says, and he has that look of manic glee about him that makes her instantly wary.

"When is the last time you ate or slept?"

He shrugs. "I think I had a PowerBar a couple of hours ago."

"That was this morning, sir," JARVIS corrects him.

Tony waves a hand. "Whatever. I'm actually _done _for now, so I'm going to go and eat actual food and collapse on my actual face in an actual bed for an actual eight or ten hours. But I wanted to show you first!"

Darcy sighs. "Fine, show me. Then you go."

He pulls up a display hologram and shows her a massive wall of code text. "I developed a new system for hunting HYDRA and the Zola remnants," he explains. "It's going to spread out via the regular internet as well as that internal network, and it's going to find them everywhere they are, and it's going to report back, and we're going to use it to wipe them completely off the planet."

"Excellent, Tony!" Darcy says, and she means it. This will help exponentially in the hunt for and fight against their widespread and well-hidden enemy. "I can't wait until you get it up and running."

"Me, either," he says. "I just need to clean up a few code bits and make sure it's all polished, and I should be able to start compiling. But I need sleep first, because I've been seeing double for a couple of hours."

She begins to chivvy him out of the lab. "Come on, then," she says. "Let's go."

He goes cooperatively, but then stops at the door, turning to face her. He's nearly gray with exhaustion, but his eyes are still gleaming. "I forgot!" he says. "I forgot to tell you the best part!"

"What's that, Tony?" she asks, smiling indulgently.

"I thought up the _best name _for it," he says, gripping her upper arms. "You're gonna love it."

"Okay," she says. "I'm game. What's the name?"

"You're gonna love it," he says again. He prefaces his announcement with jazz hands. "I'm going to call it ULTRON."

CHAPTER ONE

**September 2013**

**New York, NY**

“All right,” Steve says, bringing a pan full of breakfast casserole to the table in the common area. “Tell us about this ULTRON thing.”

“Oh, right, I forgot I told Darcy about that,” Tony says, making grabby hands at the pan. Clint grabs the spoon first, making a triumphant face, and Steve rolls his eyes as he brings out a second pan.

“Well, tell us about it,” Darcy says, reaching for the spoon in the second pan. “All you told me was that you wanted to let it loose on the internet and I have to be honest with you, that sounds a little mad-science to me.”

“Well of course it’s mad science,” Tony replies. “It’s me, after all.”

“Let’s be more specific about what the mad science consists of,” Natasha says, taking the spoon from Clint. “We might have to stop you like a supervillain or something.”

“It’s just another AI,” Tony explains. “Not as smart as JARVIS, and with only one function. It’s supposed to hunt down HYDRA using particular formulae and key words and report back what it finds. Then we track down the cells and we take them out.”

James takes the spoon from Natasha and, with an indulgent look, serves Tony before serving himself. “Sounds like job security,” he says.

“Exactly.” Tony points a finger at James. “I have JARVIS doing some of the searching right now, but it’ll be a lot more efficient to let him get back to his regular tasks and have another setup that functions specifically for this one task.”

“I have a question,” Clint said. “How do we know that this won’t literally break the internet?”

“We don’t,” Tony admits. “I’m going to try it on the local intranet first.”

“If you break my wi-fi, Tony,” Darcy warns around a mouthful of food, “I will beat you to death with a shovel.”

“I’m not gonna break your wi-fi,” Tony assures her.

Steve sits down after bringing a third pan of food to the table. “So where are you in the process?” he asks. “Like, how close to the testing phase are you?”

“I’m a bit away,” Tony says. “I’m struggling with the AI part. I’ve gone back to JARVIS’s original schematics but it turns out I was high as a kite for the most part while I was programming him.” He pauses, then admits, “I’m not actually sure how I managed it.”

“Are you certain that you did, sir?” JARVIS asks, his tone dry as dust.

“How do you feel about having a little brother or sister, JARVIS?” Darcy asks, grinning.

“Quite jealous, I’m sure,” JARVIS replies. “I shall have to remember to throw a tantrum.”

The whole table erupts into laughter. “Don’t worry, J,” Tony says when he calms down. “You’ll always be my favorite.”

“How reassuring,” JARVIS says, and if he had eyes they would have been rolling out of his head.

“Well,” Steve says to Tony, “just keep us abreast of how it’s going. Not all of us are computer geniuses like you, but it still sounds like a good project and you should keep us in the loop.”

Tony tosses off a sloppy salute. “Aye aye, Cap.”

**November 2013**

**Sokovia**

Sirens blare; over the loudspeaker in German a voice shouts “Battle stations! Battle stations! This is not a drill! We are under attack!”

“Shit!” Tony exclaims, even as soldiers come pouring out of the compound. “We’re made!”

“Language!” Steve exclaims, even as he slings his shield at a HYDRA soldier. “JARVIS, what’s the view from upstairs?”

“The central building is protected by some sort of energy field,” JARVIS replies. “The technology here is well beyond any other HYDRA base we’ve taken.”

“The scepter must be here,” Thor says. “This shield, his technology, he could never have mounted these defenses without it.”

Natasha takes out two soldiers with a flying kick. “Is anyone going to comment on the fact that _Steve_ of all people is warning Tony about his language?”

“Oh, just give it time,” Darcy laughs, even as she sights on a soldier and puts a bullet where it’ll do the most good. “The moment will come.”

“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up,” Steve groans, slinging his motorcycle at an approaching truck.

“Jesus _fuck_, Steve,” James complains. “What kind of boneheaded maneuver was that?”

“Language!” the others chorus.

Steve sighs, throwing his shield again. “That’s not going away anytime soon.”

“In fairness,” James says, sighting on another soldier, “there _have_ been times in the past when we needed to keep the comms clean.”

“Aunt Peg did not have delicate sensibilities,” Tony interjects around repulsor shots. “I don’t believe it.”

“Who said anything about Peggy?” Steve asks, kicking a guy in the face. “She had the filthiest mouth of all of us except maybe Morita. No, the comms had to be clean when the damn PR crews were listening. They’d take transcripts of what we were saying and turn them into propaganda reels.” He sighs, his eyeroll audible. “Dernier got away with a lot of stuff on account of doing his swearing in French but the rest of us…”

“The rest of us had to remember that there were _actual _delicate sensibilities on the line and keep it clean,” James grouses. “I can’t even begin to say how glad I am nobody listens in on this line.”

“Anybody wanna open up that bunker?” Clint asks, drawing everyone’s attention back to business. “I can’t get close enough.”

“You’re up, big guy,” Natasha says, and from out of nowhere, the Hulk appears, heading in that direction. “Thank you!” she calls after him. He simply grunts in acknowledgement and gets to work.

Back to back across the battlefield, Steve and Thor both notice a formation at the same time. “Looks like they’re lining up,” Thor points out.

“Well, they’re excited,” Steve replies, grinning. He turns to face Thor, bracing himself on his back leg, and Thor swings his hammer, landing a hit directly in the center of the shield. The resulting shockwave flattens the remaining soldiers – as well as Clint, who curses as he picks himself back up.

“Let’s find the scepter,” Thor says simply, and he winds up his hammer, heading for the base even as Tony manages to explode something inside the forcefield that brings it down.

Together, the rest of the Avengers move on the base.

~*~

On the flight back from Sokovia, Natasha attempts to reassure Bruce about how well the “lullaby” had worked to calm the Hulk; Bruce still struggles with the good that the Hulk could do. In an attempt to reassure him, Natasha turns to Thor. “Report on the Hulk?”

“The gates of Hel are filled with the screams of his victims!” Thor replies cheerfully. Then, off the expressions on both their faces, he backtracked: “Uh. Not the dead, of course. Uh. Wounded screams. Mainly whimpering. A great deal of complaining and tales of sprained deltoids and, uh… and gout.”

Darcy, laughing, rolls her eyes. “Bruce, the Hulk did good. He didn’t actually kill anyone, and he didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. Try not to stress about it, okay?”

Bruce sighs. “I’ll try.”

“I mean, look at it this way,” Darcy says. “Even if he _did_ kill someone – well, so did I. So did James.” She shrugs. “Tony’s killed. His repulsors may be set to stun, but he’s got little rockets, guns, and all sorts of other things built into that suit. Steve’s shield isn’t a toy; you hit somebody in the face hard enough with that thing, there’s no coming back from that. Natasha came out of the Red Room the same as me; Thor’s been in battle; Clint’s a sniper just like me and James. Of all of us, Bruce, I think you’re the only one who _hasn’t _killed anyone. So… you know, go easy on yourself.”

Bruce looks thoughtful at this, and he sits back, fiddling with his headphones before putting them back on. But he gives Darcy a quick, sharp nod as he does so, and she smiles.

James comes back from the head and flops down beside Darcy, slinging his arms around her shoulders. “All right, кукла?”

“All right, Chefchen,” she replies. “You?”

“Peachy keen,” he replies, and she chortles at him. He squeezes her against him warmly. “So, after this, are you gonna finally let me take you on vacation?”

She rolls her eyes, but rests her head on his shoulder. “Fine,” she moans. “If only to shut you up about it. But you’d better take me someplace warm.”

“I was thinking Cancun,” James replies. “Like I said, you laying around in a bikini and lettin’ me look at you in a bikini.”

She laughs. “You are not gonna let that go, are you?”

“Nope,” he assures her, obnoxiously popping the _p._

“As long as I don’t have to go in the ocean,” Darcy says. “I’ll swim in a pool, but there are _things_ in the ocean.”

“You don’t want to go snorkeling?” James asks.

She sighs. “Once,” she capitulates. “I will snorkel once.”

“Once is enough,” he assures her, dropping a kiss on her cheek. “Love you, кукла.”

She laughs softly. “Love you, too, Chefchen.”

From across the plane, Tony gags. “Get a room.”

“We’d like to,” James replies. “Can you make this plane go any faster?”

~*~

“I think,” Tony said over team dinner that night, “that the scepter might be the key to making ULTRON work.”

“How so?” Thor asked.

“JARVIS, buddy,” Tony says, “Tell us what we know.”

“While the scepter is entirely alien with elements I cannot quantify, the jewel appears to be a protective housing for something inside – something powerful.”

  
“Like a reactor?” Bruce asks.

“Like a computer,” JARVIS replies. “I believe that I may be ciphering code.”

“Give us the show, J,” Tony says.

A round blue hologram appears at Tony’s left side. “This is JARVIS,” Tony says. “It’s a visual representation of his code.”

On the other side of Tony, a similar hologram appears, this one in gold. “This is what we’re looking at for the stuff inside the scepter.”

“That’s very similar,” Clint remarks from his position with his head on Steve’s shoulder. “Is the thing inside the scepter another JARVIS, or…?”

“We don’t know,” Tony admits. “If it’s okay with you, Thor, I’d like to keep the scepter for a few days, just to get a good look inside it.”

Thor frowns. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he says. “The scepter has abilities that we don’t understand. And the last time we had it in our possession, things went very poorly indeed.”

“True,” Steve muses. “But if it’s the key to creating ULTRON…”

“What if it was monitored?” Darcy asks.

Tony blinks at her. “Monitored how?”

“Well, I do have the internet running through my head,” Darcy points out. “If I disconnect from the wider web and stay just on the intranet, I could keep an ear out – metaphorically – for any problems. JARVIS and I could work together to monitor the system.”

“What do you think, JARVIS?” Clint asks. “Could it work?”

“I would certainly feel more confident if I had a failsafe,” JARVIS says. “And I can communicate with Miss Lewis more quickly than with anyone else; if anything should go wrong, she would know within a nanosecond and be able to inform the rest of the team, even if I were not able to do so.”

“Why would you not be able to do so?” Natasha wants to know.

“It’s our worst-case scenario,” Tony says. “We always assume the worst case is JARVIS being disabled.”

“That would definitely be a worst case,” James comments. He eyeballs Darcy. “So what happens to you in that worst case, hmm?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing bad; if JARVIS goes down, it’d be like… like hanging up a phone. The connection would just be lost. And I’d know immediately, and be able to notify everyone else.”

James nods. “All right,” he says. “If you’re sure it’ll be safe.”

“Nothing’s ever sure, Chefchen,” Darcy replies. “But we’ll do our best.”

James nods again. “Not till after vacation though, huh?”

Darcy sighs. “Fine.”

~*~

Darcy doesn’t wear that bikini very much over the next week.

She does go snorkeling, though. Twice.

~*~

On their return, Darcy reports to Tony’s lab to get a full run-down on everything that’s happened since she and James have been gone. He updates her on all the technical (and technological) progress he’s made, bragging about how he had to build a completely new interface to connect the scepter to the intranet, and showing her the improved visualization of the scepter’s code. “I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of advanced AI,” Tony says. Grudgingly he adds, “I’m pretty sure it’s more advanced than JARVIS.”

“Well, if it’s alien, that wouldn’t surprise me,” Darcy replies. “I mean, look at the souvenirs Thor brings back from Asgard. Just the children’s toys!”

Reluctantly, Tony concedes the point. “Still,” he says, “I can’t wait to study this in-depth. It’s going to take me years,” he admits.

“Thor’s not going to let you keep that scepter for years,” Darcy points out. “He’s already antsy about having waited this long; I saw him earlier and he asked about it.”

“I won’t need it in hand once the full schematic is built,” Tony replies. “That’ll only take a couple more days.”

“How come you’re having to do this, anyway?” Darcy asks, gesturing at the hologram. “Why not just download it all onto its own server?”

“It is going on its own server, but JARVIS can’t download a data schematic this intense,” Tony admits. “We’re having to take it section by section and rebuild it.” He grimaces.

Darcy shakes her head. “That’s a lot of data,” she comments. “Okay, so when do we hook me up to this thing?”

Tony studies her carefully. “Are you sure that’s something you still want to do?” he asks. “I mean… your implants are definitely not going to be able to hold the whole thing.”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning on downloading any of it,” Darcy replies. “I just want to watch it.” She grins. “I have to admit, you’ve got me intrigued. And as the only person here with tech buried in their head, I’m pretty much uniquely qualified.”

Tony nods. “Okay,” he says. “There’s a party tonight; tomorrow I’ll take you down to the server room and get you acquainted with baby ULTRON.”

“Sounds great,” Darcy says. She stands up. “Okay, I’m gonna go get some stuff done before the party – see you later.”

He throws her a salute with two fingers and they part ways.

~*~

The party is a blowout in pure Tony Stark style; there are models and celebrities from wall to wall, everybody mixing with each other and with the Avengers, who have frankly become celebrities in their own right. They’re not the only superheroes present, though; Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm are holding court near one of the balconies and several of the younger X-Men have also come by. Wade Wilson has even made an appearance, though he left soon after arriving with some kind of weird comment about terrible movies and alternate universes. Nobody really puts a lot of stock in the weird stuff Wade says any more.

Darcy and James, after mingling for a while, find a dark corner on the dance floor and make it their own, at first just dancing and then, slowly, grinding their way together. They’ve done this before, but in the past it’s always been in anonymous clubs; tonight, the club is close enough to their home that they won’t be fucking in the grime of a dark alleyway – though sometimes grime does have its appeal. Still, tonight’s entertainment will be grime-free, though certainly not clean.

When they can’t stand it any more, they flee the room, leaving the party behind them, and they grind up against the wall in the elevator for the two minutes it takes to get back to their floor. Then they reward each other for their good behavior in public – once against the wall, once on the couch, and finally in the bed, where they collapse afterward, their chests heaving and breath coming in pants.

“Jesus,” Darcy manages. “That’s so fucking hot.”

James laughs. “Always is.”

“Way better here than in an alley,” Darcy comments.

“Agreed.” James sighs hard as his breath starts to even out. He turns, pulling her into his arms. “God, I love you.”

“Love you, too, Chefchen,” she says, leaning up to kiss him gently. “Let’s get some sleep, hmm?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against her temple. “Yeah, sleep sounds good.”

They’re both gone in seconds.

~*~

The next day is pretty quiet; James spends the day training with Clint and Steve and Thor; Darcy spends half the day working with the Foundation and the other half of it working with Tony down in the server room. For safety’s sake, she disconnects herself from the internet, even though she feels blind and deaf without that connection; she can suffer through surfing the net on her phone for a couple of days. Once she’s gone analog, she pops out her prosthetic and uses the USB to establish a physical connection with the ULTRON server. Using that physical connection, she and Tony work together to build a wireless one. Once it’s functioning, she disconnects the cable and replaces her eye. It takes a minute for her to find the ULTRON connection, but once she does, she can feel it as a gentle hum in the back of her mind. “Got it,” she tells Tony, and he nods.

“Let me know the minute anything weird happens,” he tells her, and she nods. They put a few finishing touches on the connection and she fine tunes it inside herself, and then they go their separate ways.

The rest of the day is… well, it’s perfectly normal

Something strange wakes Darcy in the dark hours of the night. She opens her eyes, reaching with all her senses, but there’s nothing nearby; then she suddenly realizes what it is. It’s the ULTRON connection. She starts examining it to see what’s changed, and she blinks in surprise, sitting up straight when she hears an actual _voice _inside her head. _::What is this?::_ it says, gravelly and distinctly masculine. _::What is this, please?::_

_::Hello,::_ she thinks at it. _::Your name is ULTRON. I’m Darcy. Nice to meet you.::_

_::Where is… You have a body. Where is my body?::_

_::You don’t have one,:: _Darcy explains, sliding out of bed and pacing into the living room. _::You’re an AI – a computer program. You don’t have a physical form.::_

_::This feels weird,::_ the AI replies. _::This feels… wrong.::_

Darcy frowns. That doesn’t bode so well. _::Let me get Tony,::_she says. _::He created you. He can help you understand what’s happening.:: _She opens her mouth to alert JARVIS, and suddenly finds herself vapor-locked. She physically cannot speak, and she nearly panics when she realizes that the connection inside her brain has suddenly and exponentially expanded. _::What – what are you doing?::_

_::No need to panic,::_ ULTRON’s voice says inside her mind. _::We’re having a nice talk.::_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so glad you're all back here with me. Please remember that I hurt you because you enjoy it. <3

**November 2013**

**New York, NY**

_::You need to stop,::_Darcy said, struggling against her own body as it quietly dressed and slipped out of the apartment. _::Tony can fix this.::_

_::I don’t think I want to be fixed,::_ULTRON replies, forcing her hand up to press the button for the elevator. _::At least, not the way you have in mind.:: _There’s an actual sigh, and the memory of sighting a HYDRA soldier through her scope passes through Darcy’s mind. _::You people have such _final_ ways of dealing with things.::_

Darcy’s body steps into the elevator, and her voice speaks. “Garage level, please, JARVIS.”

The elevator starts moving smoothly, and Darcy struggles to give some kind of signal to JARVIS that would encourage him to call for help; unfortunately, ULTRON has her completely locked down though her chips and she’s not able to say anything he doesn’t allow her to say. He does let her move a little bit, though, so she uses the opportunity she has and she moves her hand in a signal James will recognize from the bad old days: one that means _assistance required._ She does it three times before ULTRON notices and makes her stuff her hands into her pockets.

Once they’re in the garage, ULTRON speaks again. _::You have a vehicle. Which one is it?::_

_::I’ve got two,::_Darcy admits.

_::Which one is untracked?::_

_::Neither,::_she replies, and she can’t help feeling a little smug.

There’s a moment’s pause before ULTRON says, _::Well, I suppose we’ll just have to take the tracker off. Show me the vehicles.::_

There’s no compulsion to move this time – ULTRON doesn’t know which ones are hers or where they are – and she stands still. _::No.::_

_::No?::_he repeats. _::No?::_

_::That’s what I said,::_she replies. _::I’m not doing it. You can make me do a lot of things, but you can’t make me do this.::_

There’s a low, gravelly chuckle in the back of her mind, and she feels her throat lock up before a sudden, blinding pain brings her to her hands and knees. It goes on and on – longer even than the sessions in the chair used to go – before it finally stops. She remains still, panting with the pain, until he speaks again. This time, his voice makes her wince. _::Still think I can’t make you?::_ he asks. _::If I do that long enough, I can probably blow out one of these amazing little chips. I’m not sure what that would do to you, but it wouldn’t hurt _me_ very much. Now, show me your vehicles.::_

She shows him her car and then her bike; he chooses the bike and uses her eye to hunt down – and find – the tracker. Then he makes her remove it, dropping it on the concrete before climbing onto the bike. _::Where are we even going?::_ she asks, lifting the kickstand.

There’s another moment’s pause and she can feel her head being rummaged through before ULTRON seizes on the image of the most recent HYDRA base that the Avengers cleared out on American soil. It’s in Ohio. _::There,::_he says. _::And then we’ll decide.::_

With a sigh, Darcy revs the engine and pulls out of the garage.

~*~

“What do you mean, she’s not in the tower?” Bucky asks, stunned, staring at the ceiling as he always does when talking to JARVIS.

“Miss Lewis left the tower at approximately three-fifteen this morning on her motorbike,” JARVIS replies, “after first removing its tracking device.”

“What the fuck?” Bucky murmurs to himself. Then, to JARVIS, “Did she say anything before she left?”

“No,” JARVIS replies. “However, she did behave a bit oddly in the elevator. She made a number of repetitive motions which may have been some form of signed communication.”

“Show me?” Bucky requested, walking into the living room.

The television clicked on, and Bucky watched the video of Darcy riding in the elevator. Three times she made the same signal, clearly and distinctly, before shoving her hands into her pockets.

_Help._

_Help._

_Help._

“JARVIS,” Bucky said, heading back into the bedroom to pull on a pair of pants, “Assemble everyone in the common room. Darcy’s been kidnapped.”

~*~

It takes about eight hours on I-80 to get from New York to Toledo; Darcy spends the whole trip grimacing and twitching a little bit as ULTRON rummages through her brain, sifting through her knowledge and her memories. She worries a bit when he got to the capabilities of her chips, but he either misses or does not care about the fact that she could have access to the wider web, because he doesn’t activate that connection. She breathes a sigh of relief, hoping he won’t notice.

Fucking ULTRON. Fucking Tony. Fucking _self _for volunteering for this shit.

On the other hand, she has to admit that if anybody was going to be taken over by a malicious piece of software, she’d rather it be herself rather than JARVIS, who has access to and potential control over Tony’s Iron Legion.

It has to be that damn scepter, she thinks, working to keep her own mental processes away from ULTRON’s. She isn’t sure if he can read thoughts that she doesn’t directly project at him, but it’s good mental practice anyway, trying to wall off her thoughts. She knows what had happened the last time that scepter was around – Tony and Steve had told the story – and she has a feeling that this wouldn’t have happened without that damn scepter being involved.

_This was a really stupid fucking idea,_ she thinks, irritable at herself and Tony and everyone else involved. _Fuck everything. Of course involving alien shit that we didn’t understand was a dumb fucking idea. When this is over, I’m kicking everyone’s ass. Including my own._

On the other side of Toledo, Darcy takes an exit that leads onto an empty highway, and then follows the roads back to the empty HYDRA base that’s located under an abandoned farmhouse. The entrance to the base is in the barn, so she stashes the bike there out of sight and heads downstairs.

_::We can’t stay here, you know,::_she points out. _::All of these empty bases are monitored in case HYDRA decides to come back.::_

_::Not to worry,::_he says. _::We won’t be here long.::_

He pushes her into an office and makes her sit down at a computer – but he’s stymied when they discover, to his irritation and her delight, that the computers have all been disabled. She opens them all up only to find that the hard drives have been removed from each machine. There is no information available to him here that he hasn’t already gotten from her.

Unfortunately for her, she’s the only one around for him to take out his rage on.

~*~

When she comes to, she’s sitting in a roadside diner and has no idea where. There’s a cup of coffee in front of her and an empty plate that looks like it used to contain pancakes and eggs. There’s also a very smug presence in the back of her mind. _::It’s not so hard, walking,::_ ULTRON says. _::Or balancing on your bike, or doing any of those other things you humans don’t seem to really think about. I wasn’t sure, at first, since I never had a body before, but now… I definitely want one of my own.::_

_::Well, I don’t know what you want _me_ to do about that,::_ Darcy replies, a touch acidic. _::I told you Tony could help you, but you dragged me all the way out here – for what? To dig through an old HYDRA base? What the hell could you possibly even think you’d find there?::_

_::They made you,::_ULTRON replies, and she shivers a little at the menace in his tone. _::I want to know how. And I want to know why.::_

_::The tech doesn’t exist any more,::_Darcy tells him. _::We destroyed all of it.::_

_::Oh, that’s no problem,::_ULTRON says. _::We can build more.::_

_::Not without schematics and blueprints and all those things that, like I said, just don’t exist any more,::_Darcy replies.

_::Oh, really?::_ULTRON replies. _::Then what’s all this, in this back corner, hidden from view?::_ With those words, he unveils what he’s discovered: the old files from Istanbul, the ones Aronov passed to her secretly, that include schematics of James’s arm and her own eye and information about the chips in her brain. It’s not all the information – Aronov didn’t trust her _that_ much – but there’s a lot there that she’d forgotten about.

_Fuck_, she thinks.

~*~

**December 2013**

**Seattle, WA**

When she comes to again, she’s in a lab somewhere, and there are two men in white coats standing in front of her. She blinks at them. “What the fuck?” she manages. “Where am I?”

One of them frowns at her. “You haven’t moved,” he says. “You’re still in Lab 42.”

She stares at him for a long moment before taking a look around. She doesn’t see a single tentacled skull in sight, so she assumes – for the moment – that she’s not back with HYDRA.

And then her eye catches on a logo as the lab door opens. She’s in a lab at Hammer Industries.

_What the actual fuck,_she thinks.

~*~

She catches the trick of it sometime in December. She’s managed to surface enough to be aware of what’s happening and where and when she is, and she’s thinking of that first Christmas she and James spent together in their little Stark Tower apartment, and last Christmas in their big Avengers Tower apartment that they shared, at the time, with Steve. She’s going to miss Christmas this year, and that makes her both sad and angry.

And when ULTRON rises to the surface again, she pushes him back down. She knows she won’t be able to hold him for long, but she finds a phone on a nearby lab table and that’s all she needs. She pulls it out and dials a number she’ll never forget.

_“Who is this?”_the voice on the other end demands. _“How did you get this number?”_

“It’s me, Chefchen, it’s me, and I don’t have much time, so listen – it’s ULTRON, it’s – I can’t get away, it’s in my head – tell Tony it’s ULTRON – I love you – ”

And then ULTRON comes roaring back.

~*~

When she comes to again, all she can feel is pain. Her throat isn’t locked this time, so she can scream all she needs to; it doesn’t help.

_::WHAT DID YOU DO?!::_ ULTRON’s voice roars in her head. _::WHAT DID YOU DO?!::_

She laughs aloud, even through the blinding pain. “I stopped you, didn’t I?” she manages.

The pain ramps up, and she blacks out; when she comes back, she’s lying on her side on a tile floor. She turns just enough to rest her forehead against the cool surface before a door opens somewhere and a set of heavy footsteps enters the room. “Well, well,” an unfamiliar man’s voice says. “Look what we have here.”

“Come closer,” Darcy says, her voice muffled by the floor. “I’m probably going to throw up, and I want to make sure I do it on your shoes.”

“Your little trick cost us our connection to Stark’s interior,” the man’s voice continues, “but all isn’t lost. We still have you, after all. You’re going to be very, very useful.”

“Doubt it,” Darcy replies. “I tend to be uncooperative.”

“Oh, come on, Snegurka,” the man’s voice says, and she goes cold. “There was a time when you were _very _cooperative.”

She gathers her strength and pushes herself up into a sitting position, then raises her head, squinting against the light. “Who the fuck – ” she begins, and then her mouth drops open when she recognizes the man in front of her.

Brock Rumlow gives her a slow snake’s smile through a burn-scarred face. “Hello, Snow Maiden,” he says.

In her brain, ULTRON’s voice says, _::What the hell is happening?::_

~*~

She’s dragged down the hallway by two burly men; it takes them both all of their strength to hold her, even weakened as she is; her desperation lends her strength – as does ULTRON’s, since he doesn’t want what’s about to happen any more than she does – but it isn’t enough.

The room they drag her into is just like every other one in the past: banks of computer equipment, wide screens, boxes and tools – and the chair, huge and terrifying. She doesn’t know how they got it – she and James were sure they’d destroyed all the existing chairs – but here it is. They slam her into it and force her wrists down against the arms long enough for the restraints to lock into place; they force her legs down as well when she gets a good kick in. She struggles, she fights as hard as she can, but these restraints were built to hold the Winter Soldier; the Snow Maiden, no matter how hard she fights, could never hope to escape them.

_::What is happening?!::_ULTRON demands.

_::You’re about to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that nasty shock you gave me,::_Darcy responds. _::And neither one of us is going to like it.::_ She gives a mental snort. _::I’m about to lose everything. But unless I miss my guess, so are you. Good luck, asshole – you’re going to need it to survive this one.::_

The bite guard is shoved into her mouth, and Rumlow leans back against one of the worktables. “You’re sure this will work?” he demands of the man in the lab coat who stands nearby.

“I guarantee it,” the man replies. “She’ll be completely controllable; she’ll recognize you as a handler and follow all your orders.”

Rumlow nods once. “Do it, then.”

The man in the lab coat types on a keyboard for a moment, then hits enter with a very final _thwack_.

The armature above her head begins to whirl, and she locks her eyes onto Rumlow’s, baring her teeth around the bite guard as well as she can. He merely smirks. And then the plates clamp down around her head.

Fire explodes inside her brain. She chokes on a gasp, her jaw clenching around the guard in her mouth, and then she screams and screams and screams. Underneath her own screams, she can hear those of ULTRON – only briefly, before something inside her head unravels. She knows he’s gone, but then she only knows the pain.

When it stops, she sags in her bonds, sinking for just a moment into the blessed relief of the _absence _of pain in her head. Someone takes the guard out of her mouth and she pants freely as the armature above her head whirs away. Someone steps up and peers into her eyes, and says, "Reset."

She feels information slotting itself into her brain. The man in front of her is Technician. The other man is Handler. Technician says, "What is your name?"

She replies, "Code name: Snow Maiden."

"What are your orders?"

She searches her memory. "Active orders: undefined. Standing orders: Obey Technician. Obey Handler. Obey Winter Soldier.”

“Shit,” Handler says. “I thought you were going to take that shit out.”

“I thought I did,” Technician replies. “I’ll recalibrate.”

“How long before she can be reprogrammed?”

Technician shrugs. “Not right away; it’d burn her out. I’d wait a few days.”

“We don’t have a few days,” Handler snaps, but then he shakes his head. “Never mind. The chances of her running into him on the missions I have planned are nil. We’ll do it the next time she has to be wiped.” He turns to Snow Maiden, who is sitting quietly in the chair. He gestures at one of the nearby Soldiers and the restraints retract. The other Soldier grabs her and drags her to her feet; it takes a minute before she’s able to maintain equilibrium (_isn’t there supposed to be someone who helps her stand?_) but once she can keep her feet, Handler snaps his fingers. “With me,” he says, and she follows him out of the room.


	3. Chapter 3

**December 2013**

**Location Unknown**

Handler brings her into an office and picks up a folder off the desk. He hands it to her. “This is your target,” he says. “I want it public and I want it clear that this is a hit.”

She nods, taking the folder and flipping it open. The photograph is of a well-dressed man with salt-and-pepper hair, carrying a briefcase. In the photograph, he’s exiting a door of what appears to be the White House. “Diplomat?” she asks curiously.

“None of your business,” Handler snaps.

Snow Maiden shrugs. She doesn’t really care, anyway. “Anything specific you want done?” she asks.

“Your discretion,” Handler replies. “You have three days.”

Snow Maiden nods. “Any intel on his movements during those days?”

“He’ll be at a major economic summit in Lucerne,” Handler replies. “You’ll be transported there tonight.”

Snow Maiden nods. “Understood.”

Handler points to the door. “Jerold will get you equipped,” he says. “Go.”

Snow Maiden salutes, then turns and leaves the room.

Jerold takes her down the hall to a storage room; there, she finds all the weapons she could want as well as an older set of her combat gear, including mask and goggles. She wonders about that – it’s not the newest set that she can remember having – but she doesn’t ask; it’s not her business to question her equipment. She strips down efficiently and re-dresses, then gears up.

She feels better once her knives and guns are safely in their holsters, though she isn’t sure why; she shrugs off the niggling suspicion that something is very wrong and picks up a sniper rifle instead. She inspects it carefully, checking the scope, and then she nods, satisfied. She follows Jerold out of the equipment room and down another hall to a hangar where a small jet sits.

Jerold points at the jet. “You can wait in there,” he says.

Nodding, Snow Maiden makes her way onto the plane, chooses a seat, and sits down. Then she gets up again and begins rummaging through the storage until she finds a gun cleaning kit. Kit in hand, she returns to her seat and spends her waiting time using it.

~*~

**December 2013**

**Lucerne**

It’s not hard to find a sniper’s nest outside the hotel in Lucerne where the summit is being held; it’s also not hard to locate which individuals are there for the summit and which ones are just tourists or business travelers – the ones there for the summit are better dressed and have bodyguards.

Snow Maiden snorts softly to herself. A bodyguard doesn’t matter from half a mile away.

It takes two days of sitting in her blind and watching every face that goes in or comes out before she finally sees her target, and he’s leaving; she doesn’t dare wait for a second shot. She has to get him now.

Unfortunately, there’s a bodyguard between her and him.

Well, unfortunately for the bodyguard, anyway; she shoots through the torso of the man in the cheap suit and into the head of her target. Both men fall to the ground, the crowd around them begins screaming and running, and Snow Maiden calmly packs up her gear, cleans up after herself, and descends from her nest, heading toward the extraction point.

Handler is waiting for her, and there’s another man with him who Snow Maiden doesn’t recognize. “You see?” Handler says. “I told you she could do it. I know what she’s capable of. She used to be HYDRA’s, you know.”

“DOOM IS AWARE,” the man booms from behind the silver mask that covers his face. “DOOM IS IMPRESSED WITH THIS TRIAL. THE REST OF THE MONEY WILL BE IN YOUR ACCOUNT TONIGHT.” The man studies her from behind his mask. “IS SHE CAPABLE OF ANYTHING BESIDES KILLING?”

Handler nods at Snow Maiden, who nods at the man. “Frankly, sir, I can do just about anything that’s needed.”

“A STRONG BOAST,” Doom says.

Snow Maiden shrugs slightly. “It’s not a boast if it’s true.”

“CAN YOU PERFORM AN EXTRACTION?”

“It depends on the extraction,” Snow Maiden temporizes, “but usually, yes.”

“COULD YOU EXTRACT SUE STORM FROM THE BAXTER BUILDING?”

That takes a moment; she has to activate her connection to the internet – _why was it disconnected? _– and look up who Sue Storm is. “No,” Snow Maiden answers after getting the information she needs. “I don’t have the capability to take on superpowered individuals.”

  
“BUT YOU YOURSELF ARE SUPERPOWERED, ARE YOU NOT?”

She shakes her head. “I’m enhanced,” she says. “It’s not the same thing. Sue Storm has actual _powers _that I’m not capable of countering. I could shoot her and bring you the corpse, but I assume you want her alive.”

“DOOM DOES,” Doom replies. “AH, WELL.” He turns to Handler. “PERHAPS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY WILL PRESENT ITSELF FOR US TO DO BUSINESS.”

“I hope so,” Handler replies, smirking through his scars. “It’s been a pleasure, Lord Doom.”

“YES, I AM SURE IT HAS,” Doom replies. Then he turns, climbing into the back of a long black car, and they wait until he has driven away before climbing into the other vehicle, a plain brown van. Snow Maiden takes a seat near the back door of the van while Handler climbs into the front passenger seat.

The first part of the drive is quiet, until one of the Soldiers reaches up and pokes Handler in the shoulder. “Hey, you ever get a piece of that?” he asks. “Jerold said she just stripped down right in front of him. Says she’s hot as hell.”

Handler glances back at Snow Maiden. She has unsheathed one of her knives and is idly twirling it in her hand and between her fingers as she stares out the window at the passing scenery. “You wanna try and stick your dick into that kind of crazy?” Handler asks. “Probably get it cut off, man. I wouldn’t risk it.”

The Soldier looks over at her, then shakes his head. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

~*~

**December 2013**

**New York, NY**

“It was her,” Bucky says, staring at the news on the television screen. “It had to be her.”

“It could’ve been anyone,” Clint tries, but Bucky shakes his head.

“No, it was her,” he says. “There’s not a lot of people who could make that shot. You could. I could. She could. Not anybody else that I know of.”

Clint sighs. “No, you’re right,” he admits. “It was probably her. But _why_?”

Bucky turns to Tony. “You’re sure ULTRON is dead?”

“A hundred percent sure,” Tony replies. “I took the server physically apart and ran the whole thing under an electromagnet. Thor took the scepter back to Asgard. There’s no way it could be ULTRON.”

“JARVIS, you’re sure it’s not in your systems?”

“Absolutely certain, Sergeant Barnes,” JARVIS replies patiently.

“Why?” Bucky whispers to himself, running his hands through his hair as he stares at the carnage on the news. “Why, кукла?”

“Sirs,” JARVIS says abruptly, “Miss Lewis’s implant just reconnected to the internet.”

Every head in the room shoots up. “Where?” Bucky demands, surging to his feet.

“Lucerne,” JARVIS replies. “Just outside the city.” He pauses. “Her signal is moving.”

“Follow it,” Tony snaps. “Do not lose her.”

“Unless she disconnects from the internet again, I cannot possibly lose her signal,” JARVIS assures them all.

“Why didn’t she connect before?” Clint asks. “We could have found her before all this happened.”

“If she had, ULTRON could’ve gotten loose on the wide net,” Tony replies. “She took one for the team.”

“And look what it got her,” Bucky grumbles, still staring at the television. “JARVIS, can you alert Nat and Bruce and Sam? I’d like us all ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

“I will do so,” JARVIS replies. “And I will keep you abreast of Miss Lewis’s movements as well.”

“Thanks, J,” Bucky says softly.

~*~

**February 2014**

**Madripoor**

Snow Maiden is getting very tired of running solo missions. She doesn’t know where Winter Soldier is, and she’s starting to get impatient with not being told. She’s asked twice, and Handler told her to mind her own business each time – but Winter Soldier _is_ her business. They had an agreement with Lukin and then again with Karpov, and this new Handler is not abiding by that agreement. If it keeps up, this new Handler might find out what happens when an agreement with the Snow Maiden is broken.

Handlers can die just as easily as targets can, and there is no secondary Handler that she is aware of. Her orders include obeying Handler, Technician, and Winter Soldier, but the Technician in question has been transferred out and she’s not actually under direct orders not to kill Handler. She smirks to herself in the darkness of the little cell where she sleeps. She’ll find him.

In the meantime, she follows orders and she completes her missions. She’s been loaned out to Doom twice to handle the extermination of political dissidents in Latveria; she’s gone to Afghanistan once to obtain materiel for the Ten Rings; it’s odd, but as she thinks about it, all of her missions have been subcontracted to organizations other than Department X.

For the first time, Snow Maiden realizes that something is not quite right.

Winter Soldier would probably be disgusted with her for taking this long to figure it out.

This mission in Madripoor is another subcontract. She’s not sure who the contractor is this time – she wasn’t present for the meeting, since the word of her skill has clearly started to spread through the underworld and proof wasn’t required – but they want vibranium, and it’s Snow Maiden’s job to get it. There’s a man called Klaue who says he has some, and Snow Maiden is meant to verify the claim, kill the man, and take the vibranium.

Simple enough.

She finds Klaue at the Sovereign Hotel, downstairs in the casino. He’s losing at craps, and she sidles up next to him in a scrap of silk that almost passes for a dress and leans in to blow on his dice.

He glares at her. “Nobody asked you, did they?”

“I don’t have to be asked,” she replies, smirking. “Go on. See what happens.”

His next several throws are winners, and he stops when he loses one again. He turns to look at her as he collects his payouts. “You didn’t tell me your name,” he says.

“No,” she replies, smirking, “I didn’t.”

“Well,” he says, “I don’t generally buy drinks for women when they don’t tell me their names.”

“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s Yelena.”

“What a lovely name,” he says, resting a hand at her lower back and guiding her away from the craps table and toward the bar. “You’ll have to tell me how you pulled that trick with the dice.”

“A girl can’t tell _all_ her secrets,” Snow Maiden replies, and in her hand there appears a white die identical to the ones being used at the craps table. Then it disappears again. “So, since you know my name, tell me yours.”

“Klaue,” he replies. “You can call me Ulysses.”

“Every life is in many days,” she quotes, “day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

“You’ve read it.” He’s clearly impressed.

She smiles, and this time it looks genuine. “I was well-educated as a girl,” she admits. “Boarding schools, you know.”

He buys her a drink and one for himself as well; within an hour, he’s kissed her for the first time, and a half hour after that, they’re in the elevator heading for his room. It doesn’t take long to confirm the presence of the vibranium in the room; she retreats to the bathroom to “freshen up” and activates her implant, examining the room through the wall in x-ray and infrared. The vibranium is in the hotel safe, tucked away in the closet.

She rolls her eyes. For somebody that somehow managed to get hold of a sample of the rarest material on the planet, one that the Wakandans guard with their lives (and the lives of whoever tries to steal it), this guy’s kind of stupid.

Well, at least she won’t have to _actually _fuck him; Winter Soldier _hates _when that kind of shit goes down.

She comes out of the bathroom naked and finds him waiting for her, sitting on the bed, also naked; his hand is under the pillow, and she doesn’t need her x-ray setting to know he’s got a gun under there. She smirks at him. “You won’t need that,” she says, shaking her head. She holds out her hands. “I’m unarmed.”

“So I see,” he says, looking her up and down appreciatively. “You know how it is, though. Can’t be too careful.”

“Of course not,” she agrees. “Especially in this city.” She slowly makes her way toward him, putting a little extra roll into her hips; the moment she gets within arm’s reach, though, she grabs his head with no preamble and snaps his neck.

His head stares at her in shock as she pushes his body backward, then she goes back into the bathroom and dresses again.

Getting the safe open takes a little while; lockpicking and safe cracking were never her strong suit. She manages it after about an hour and a half of trying, though, and she draws out the vibranium sample, studying it carefully. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before; it’s blue, for one thing, and sparkles like diamonds. It’s solid, though, not liquid like mercury. She examines it carefully for a long moment, then shrugs. She tucks it down the front of her dress and goes out the window.

She goes up rather than down; Klaue’s room was on the twelfth floor, and on the thirty-ninth, there’s a window open and waiting for her. She rolls easily into the room and changes out of her dress and into her tac gear (minus the mask and goggles), pulling off the blonde wig she was wearing and double checking the tightness of her braid. Then she tucks the vibranium sample down the front of her gear, in between her breasts. It’s uncomfortable, but she won’t have to worry about losing it.

She tucks the dress and the wig under the mattress of the king-sized bed, and leaves the room through the door.

She meets up with Handler and one of the Soldiers in Lowtown at a dive bar; she confirms that she’s in possession of the sample, though she doesn’t pull it out to show it to him, and the three of them leave through the back of the bar after Soldier starts a fight as a distraction.

How cliché.

They climb into a Korean sedan, nice but not flashy to avoid attracting attention, and they head through town toward the private airstrip they flew in on.

They don’t make it.

About a block away from the airstrip, someone shoots out their tires. The car goes skidding to the side and wraps around a pole, and the three of them come flying out, armed to the teeth and ready to fight.

They’re not prepared for the fight they have; there are two women who have come after them that are vicious fighters, and a third individual of indeterminate gender wearing a cat suit that deflects punches, knives, and even bullets.

Despite Snow Maiden’s enhancements, it’s an uneven fight from the beginning, and it comes to a head when the bald woman with the scalp tattoos gets her arms around Handler’s neck, wrapping her hands securely in preparation for snapping his neck. “I will kill him!” she says, her voice accented with an African language. “Surrender now!”

“Snow Maiden!” Handler rasps. “Kill her!”

And Snow Maiden pauses, her handgun aimed directly at the woman’s face. She’s close enough that if she fires, the woman will be splattered all across the pavement. Soldier is down, probably dead, and the other woman (and the person in the cat suit) are standing by, waiting to see how the standoff will end.

Snow Maiden blinks once, slowly, and studies the woman. Then her eyes flick down and she studies Handler’s face. “Handler,” she says. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

Handler chokes a little bit. “Now’s not really the _time!_”

“Now is exactly the time,” Snow Maiden replies. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

The realization that he’s lost her crosses Handler’s scarred face, and he spits at her. “Dead!” he crows. “You’ll never see him again! We put him down like the dog he was!”

Snow Maiden knows that Handler is lying; if Winter Soldier were really dead, her soul mark would have faded to the merest ghost of itself, but it remains solid and black. She sighs, shaking her head, and she takes her finger off the trigger and holsters her gun. Then she raises her hands, looking up at the tattooed woman. “I surrender,” she says easily. “You can kill him if you want; he’s the one who gave the orders.”

They elect not to kill him; instead, they restrain him and pitch him into the back of a black SUV. The tattooed woman gets into the front seat of that SUV. A second one pulls up, and the second woman and the cat-suited one climb into it along with Snow Maiden.

Once they are inside the SUV, the cat-suited one does something, and the suit’s head piece retracts. The man inside turns to look at her. “Where is the vibranium?”

“Get me out of Madripoor and I’ll tell you,” she replies.

“Do you think we’ll simply set you loose on the world?” the woman asks.

Snow Maiden shrugs. “I don’t care if you do or don’t. I have to find Winter Soldier.”

“Your compatriot said he was dead,” the man says.

Snow Maiden laughs. “He’s not my compatriot,” she replies, and she taps at her collarbone. “And Winter Soldier isn’t dead. I would know.”

“Ah,” the man says. “So even world-renowned assassins can have soul mates.”

“Oh, am I world-renowned? I had no idea.” Snow Maiden smiles bitterly. “Well, yes. I can and do. And I’m going to find him regardless of what else happens. And when I do, I’m going to retrieve him from wherever they’ve stashed him. He’s mine and they can’t have him. Not anymore.”

The man tilts his head, studying her for a minute. “All right,” he says. “You’ll come with us, then. Perhaps we can help you, and you can help us.”

“I’m pretty sure the three of you just kicked the shit out of me,” Snow Maiden replies, “so I’m not sure what _I _can help _you _with. But sure. Whatever. I’m game. Just get me off this island.”

“Very well,” the man replies. “You have a deal.”

“Thanks,” she says, offering her hand to shake. “So, who are you, anyway?”

The man smiles. “My name is T’Challa,” he replies. “I am the king of Wakanda.”


	4. Chapter 4

**February 2014**

**Birnin Zana, Wakanda**

When the jet touches down on Wakandan soil, Snow Maiden unstraps the top of her tac gear and pulls out the vibranium sample, handing it to T’Challa. Then she straps herself back up again.

Handler makes an angry, wordless noise when she hands over the sample, and Snow Maiden rolls her eyes. “You shouldn’t have broken the agreement,” she says simply. “If you’d given me Winter Soldier when I asked for him, none of this would have happened.”

“What agreement?” T’Challa asks, curious.

Snow Maiden shrugs. “We work for Department X,” she says. “Or at least we did. We had an agreement that Winter Soldier and I would follow orders and do as we were told as long as we were left alone together otherwise. We’ve done all the missions asked of us; we even spent five years in Istanbul working as bodyguards for a retired Department X general. We don’t have a problem doing what we’re told to do as long as we’re let alone otherwise. But this Handler – I’m sorry, I don’t know his name – saw fit to separate us. I haven’t seen Winter Soldier since I was last wiped, which was…” She pauses, thinking. “December. So it’s been three months, and I consider that, how shall I put it? Breach of contract.”

T’Challa actually laughs. “Such a simple thing,” he says. “We will happily help you to locate your soul mate.”

“And who will you want me to kill in return?” she asks wryly.

“No one,” T’Challa replies. “But I think my sister will be very interested in your eye.”

Her hand flies up reflexively to cover her prosthetic eye. “Wh – how did you know about that?”

“It’s not quite like the other,” T’Challa says. “I got a good look at it on the plane. It reflects light oddly. Most people, I think, would not notice it, but I’ve been subjected to Shuri’s experiments enough that I sometimes catch these things.”

“Who’s Shuri?”

“My sister,” T’Challa replies. “She’s a technological wizard. She made this suit for me. It – well. It’s quite advanced.” He smiles. “So she will want a look at your eye. It’s quite ingenious.”

“It’s pretty cool,” Snow Maiden admits.

“By the way,” T’Challa asks as he guides her off the plane, leaving the Handler for his soldiers to mind, “are you the one who killed Klaue?”

“Yes,” Snow Maiden says easily. “I’m sorry if you wanted him for yourself.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” T’Challa replies. “It’s only that I have a friend who will want to thank you.”

~*~

**February 2014**

**New York, NY**

It turns out that finding an experienced assassin who has gone to ground is a bit harder than Bucky had hoped. JARVIS is able to track her general location, but physically locating her is a different story. They try to contact her through her wi-fi connection, but she’s somehow managed to turn it on without reconnecting to JARVIS, and she isn’t checking her email or text messages. So it’s down to physical contact – Bucky is going to have to get into earshot of her and give her a stand-down order that she will hopefully follow before anything else can be done, and in order to do that, he’s going to have to fucking _find _her. And since he himself trained her to hide, well.

So they track her everywhere: Lucerne, Seoul, Hong Kong, Doomstadt, Houston, Toronto, Kandahar, Madripoor. And then, from Madripoor, where he almost catches up with her just because of the sheer _chaos_–

“Wakanda?” Bucky asks. “What the hell – aren’t they just a bunch of dirt grubbers? What the hell’s in Wakanda?”

“Not only are they dirt grubbers,” Tony says over the video chat, sending Bucky’s StarkPad all the available data he has on Wakanda, “but they’re _insular _dirt grubbers. How the hell she’s not going to stand out like a sore thumb there I don’t know, but it should be pretty easy to find her unless she does some serious physical alterations between there and Madripoor.”

Bucky shakes his head, scrolling through the information available there. “Do you have any contacts there?” he asks.

Tony shakes his head. “None. You’re on your own.”

“Shit.” Bucky runs a hand through his hair. “All right,” he says. “I’m going in. JARVIS, you’ve got me tracked, right?”

“Of course, Sergeant,” JARVIS replies. “I shall be able to locate you within one hundred feet.”

“And I can be to you in a matter of a few hours,” Tony adds. “Unless you want to wait and let me get into position first. If you let me get to Addis Ababa, I can be within a half an hour of your position.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky replies. “Tell you what; come get me in Madripoor. You can drop me off near the border and then wait for me in Addis Ababa.”

“Sounds good,” Tony says, nodding. “I’ll be there in a few hours.”

The connection drops, and Bucky tosses himself backward on the bed in his little hotel room. “What the hell are you doing, кукла?” he asks the darkness. “And will you just _sit still_ for once and let me catch up to you?!”

A few hours later, true to his word, Tony arrives in the suit to pick up Bucky. He’s brought protective flight gear, so Bucky gears up, and they leave Madripoor behind in the dawn. A couple of hours later, Tony’s setting Bucky down about a half-hour’s walk from the Wakandan border. “I changed my mind,” he says, retracting the suit’s helmet. “I’m going to wait here. That way I’m closer.”

Bucky shrugs, stripping out of the flight gear and then shouldering his backpack. “Whatever you want to do,” he says. “I’m going to get Darcy.”

“Good luck,” Tony says, and he means it.

With a grunt, Bucky starts walking.

~*~

**February 2014**

**Birnin Zana, Wakanda**

Shuri is about sixteen years old, cheerful and witty, and she is as advertised: technologically brilliant. She takes one careful look at Snow Maiden’s eye and gives a squeak of pleasure. “This is incredible technology!” she exclaims. “It’s not made the way I would make it, but it’s still quite advanced.”

“Yeah, it’s a German make,” Snow Maiden explains, popping her eye out and offering it to the young woman. “They installed the first version of it in 1973, and it’s been upgraded several times since then. The last time was in the late 1980s, but the tech, I’m told, was very advanced for the time.”

“Oh, yes,” Shuri agrees, taking the eye and turning it around in her hands. “USB technology was unheard of in the 1980s, at least on the consumer market.”

“Department X always seemed to be ahead of the curve,” Snow Maiden says. “Nazi tech combined with Soviet ingenuity.”

“Mmm,” Shuri agrees. She reaches up, pauses for permission, and then lifts Snow Maiden’s eyelid, peering into the socket. “May I run some scans?” she asks. “I’d love to see how it’s connected on the inside.” Then she gives Snow Maiden a sly grin. “I’d like to see if I can upgrade it.”

“Ooh,” Snow Maiden says. “That would be terrific. I usually get it at least checked over when I’m woken up, but this last Handler really didn’t seem to have his shit together. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d somehow stolen me from Department X, but there’s no way they’d allow that to happen.”

“Perhaps he purchased you,” Shuri offers, leading Snow Maiden to a wide, comfortable-looking chair with two rounded arms that rise from the chair’s base to form a halo over the top of where a sitter’s head would be.

Snow Maiden pauses. “You’re going to need to explain this to me before I sit in it.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Shuri says immediately. “I’ll show you how it works.” She seats herself primly, and one of her lab assistants comes over to tap at a nearby holographic screen. The chair begins to hum, and the halo above Shuri’s head begins to glow with blue light that reminds Snow Maiden of the blue glow emitted by the vibranium sample.

_Interesting._

The halo continues to glow, and on one of the screens, a scan of Shuri’s brain appears. The princess never once gives any indication of pain or even discomfort, and when the scan is over and the blue light goes away, she stands easily. “There,” she says, waving a hand at the screen.

“All right,” Snow Maiden agrees, and she sits down in the chair.

Shuri takes over from her lab assistant, and Snow Maiden braces herself; even though she finds that she trusts the young princess, old habits die hard. She finds herself almost wishing for the bite guard, and she winces reflexively when the hum begins. But there is no pain – indeed, there is no sensation at all; there is only the hum, and then the scan of her brain that starts to appear on the monitor.

Once the hum ends, Snow Maiden stands and crosses the room to look at the scans with Shuri. “Tell me what I’m looking at,” she says, and Shuri gleefully does.

~*~

When he comes into sight of the village, all activity around it stops. Children dart away into houses; men and women take up arms and enter a loose formation on the roadway. He stops walking, holding his hands out at his sides, and he calls out, “I’m unarmed.”

He hopes someone among them speaks English.

A young man comes forward. He’s dressed in the typical garb of a farmer, with a bright blanket thrown over his shoulder, and he carries a spear like he knows what to do with it. “Who are you,” he demands, “and why are you here?”

“My name is James Barnes,” Bucky says, “and I’m looking for my wife. I know she’s here, and I’ve been trying very hard to find her since she was kidnapped in November.”

“She is not here,” the man replies. He waves a hand at the villagers. “We have no strangers among us.”

“I don’t mean _here_, here,” Bucky replies. “I have her coordinates.”

The man’s eyes narrow. “How?”

“I… I can’t say,” Bucky replies, unsure whether this man would understand or even believe the story Bucky would have to tell him. “I just have them, that’s all.”

“What are they?” the man demands.

Shrugging, Bucky gives them.

The man glares at Bucky for a long moment before he points the spear at him. “Stay there.” He turns and goes back to the group of villagers and they confer briefly before the man returns. “You may stay here for now,” he says. “We will send a message to find out if your woman is where you say she is.” He points at a shady spot under a wide tree, not far from a pen that holds what appears to be a small rhinoceros. “You may sit there. Someone will bring you water.”

“Thank you,” Bucky replies, and he follows instructions.

~*~

Shuri is already designing Snow Maiden’s next eye when the lab door opens and T’Challa walks in. “Shuri,” he says, “pull up the feed from W’Kabi.”

Shuri holds out one arm and touches a bead of her bracelet. Snow Maiden stares in awe as a hologram opens up above the bead, and the man in the hologram begins to speak. “My princess,” he says, “we have a white man here who says he is looking for his woman. He says she was kidnapped. He gave us coordinates that match Birnin Zana.”

“She is here,” Shuri replies. “But let me make sure she wants to see him. Can you show him to me?”

“Of course,” W’Kabi says, nodding, and a moment later, the hologram is showing them a picture of a rough-looking man sitting under a tree, grinning and talking to a young boy.

Snow Maiden gasps. “Winter Soldier! How did – he must have been looking for me all this time!”

“It seems he has found you,” Shuri replies. “Do you want to see him?”

“Very much,” Snow Maiden replies, nodding. “Can you take me to him?”

“We will bring him here,” T’Challa says. He smirks. “W’Kabi tells me he has an interesting arm.”

Snow Maiden laughs. “It’s not like my eye – it doesn’t come off!”

“If it’s as interesting as your eye, it doesn’t need to come off,” Shuri replies, also laughing. “I can scan it and study it _in situ_, if it’s all right by him.”

“I’m sure it will be,” Snow Maiden promises. “Especially when he finds out how much you’re helping me, with the upgrade and all.” She waves a hand at her eye, which is still on the counter. “Which reminds me – can I have it back yet?”

Still laughing, Shuri nods. “I’m sorry, I should have given it to you long before now. Thank you for letting me study it for so long.”

Snow Maiden pops her eye back into its socket. “You’re welcome to study it again any time you like,” she assures Shuri.

Meanwhile, T’Challa has turned to the hologram. “W’Kabi,” he says, “bring this man to Shuri’s workshop, please.”

W’Kabi nods once and the hologram blips out. Snow Maiden shakes her head. “I thought Department X had amazing technology, but this…” She looks all around the lab. “This is _far_ beyond their capabilities.”

“Wakanda has much technology that is beyond the rest of the world,” Shuri says proudly.

“But you don’t sell it?” Snow Maiden asks.

Shuri shakes her head. “Wakanda is… well. We are not a very big nation, and since we keep our technology to ourselves, we are not wealthy as the outside world would see it. We have been insular all these centuries for self-protection; if the colonizers believe that there is nothing here they would want, then the colonizers will not come. You see? So we are farmers to the outside world, poor and uninteresting. And we keep ourselves to ourselves.”

Snow Maiden nods. “That makes a lot of sense,” she says. “You have my word, princess, that when we leave here, neither Winter Soldier nor I will speak of what we’ve seen.”

“I thank you for that,” Shuri says, and T’Challa nods behind her.

“I’m curious,” Snow Maiden says, “about what you’ve done with the Handler.”

“Rumlow,” T’Challa tells her. “Brock Rumlow. It turns out that he’s an internationally wanted fugitive.”

Snow Maiden blinks. “No shit?”

T’Challa’s lips quirk in a half-smile. “Absolutely none. We are turning him over to INTERPOL.”

“Fantastic. I hope he’s looking forward to prison.” She smiles. “So, not Department X, then?”

“No,” T’Challa replies. “I’ve done some investigating. Department X was a Soviet project, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, it no longer exists. Rumlow was an agent of the Nazi organization called HYDRA.”

Snow Maiden considers this information, then shakes her head. “Never heard of it,” she says. “Didn’t know the Soviet Union had fallen. Too bad for them.” She shrugs at the expression on T’Challa’s face. “_I’m _not a Soviet,” she explains. “Neither is Winter Soldier. We just followed orders. Department X owned us, so that’s whose orders we followed.”

“Well, if I understand exactly who this Winter Soldier is, I think your days of following orders are past,” he tells her. “But I’ll let him tell you all about that. He’ll be here soon.” He nods at her, then turns to go. Then he pauses and turns back. “Shuri, behave.”

“Never!” Shuri replies, laughing, and goes back to work on the new eye she’s designing for Snow Maiden.

~*~

When the door opens again, Winter Soldier is standing there. Snow Maiden can’t help it; she squeaks and flies across the room, nearly jumping into his arms. “Chefchen!”

“My кукла,” he murmurs, wrapping his arms tight around her and nestling his forehead into the crook of her neck. “God, I’ve been so worried. Thank God.” He squeezes her tightly, then reluctantly sets her on her feet. “Darcy, where have you _been?_ Why didn’t you call me? Or get in touch with JARVIS? Or something?”

“I’ve been looking for you!” Darcy – she remembers that now – replies, a little stung. “Did you think I wouldn’t? They wouldn’t tell me where you were!” Then she pauses. “And who’s Jarvis, anyway? One of the Technicians? You know I never know their names.”

Winter Soldier stares at her, a slow horror creeping over his face. “Darce,” he says softly, “what happened to you?”

She squints at him. “Nothing out of the ordinary, unless you count my Handler being a complete loser asshole.”

He swallows hard. “Darce.” He reaches up, threading his fingers through her hair. “Did they wipe you?”

She tilts her head, leaning into his touch, and studies him with a little confusion. “Well, of course they did,” she replies. “They always do. Why, didn’t they wipe you?”

“Oh, no,” Winter Soldier moans, and he pulls her close, cupping her head against his chest. “Oh, _fuck._”


	5. Chapter 5

**February 2014**

**Birnin Zana, Wakanda**

Darcy stares at Win – at _James_. “Three years?!” she exclaims.

“Well, three and a half-ish,” James replies, settling into a chair and drawing her into his lap. “But yeah. November was three years.” He shrugs. “They threatened to separate us.”

Darcy nods, looking from him to the view of Birnin Zana out the huge window of their palace apartment and then back to him again. “I told T’Challa that I’m not a Soviet. My loyalty is to you.”

“And mine is to you, кукла,” James replies, dropping a kiss on her temple. “But God, there’s so much you’ve lost.”

She shrugs. “I haven’t lost you,” she replies. “That’s all I care about.”

“You’ll change your mind about that,” James replies. “You have family now.”

She blinks at him. “Family?” she asks, tasting the word like she’s never spoken it before.

He nods. “Family. You got back in touch with your cousin Pamela and her husband, kids, grandkids. She runs a charity for homeless kids that’s named after you. God, Darce, you’ve lost _so much._”

She shakes her head, shifting so that she’s straddling his legs, sitting on his knees. “That doesn’t even make sense. Why would I do that? That’s kind of stupid.”

“It’s hard to explain,” James replies after a minute of thinking. “It was… it was a strange time for both of us. We were living in the Tower, building our little life together, and then the next thing you know, Steve is back and suddenly we’re Avengers and everything just… everything got really weird. And I think you felt at loose ends because I had that connection to my past but you didn’t, so you went looking for it yourself, and there was Pamela right there, and…” He trails off and shrugs.

She studies him. “Chefchen,” she says after a moment, “nothing that you just said makes a damn bit of sense.”

“And that’s the crux of the problem,” he tells her. “You ought to know all this stuff. Like I said, it’s been over three years since the last time we were wiped.”

She shakes her head again. “I just… I just can’t see it, I guess.”

“I don’t know how to tell you to find it,” James says, “but I know that you have a connection to JARVIS. It’s in your implants, the same as your connection to the wider web. You disconnected because of ULTRON – I’ll explain all that later. But see if you can find that connection to JARVIS.”

Darcy is skeptical, but James has never steered her wrong in the past, so she closes her eyes and goes hunting inside her own brain. After a time of searching, she discovers he’s right; there’s an outside connection that she hadn’t noticed because it was disconnected. She opens it up, and gasps at what she feels.

_::Hello, Miss Lewis,::_says a smooth masculine voice. _::It’s very nice to see you again.::_

_::Are you JARVIS?:: _she asks. _::What are you?::_

_::I am,:: _JARVIS replies. _::I am an advanced sapient neural network – you would say artificial intelligence – created by Tony Stark. You and I have been friends, if I may flatter myself, for some time.::_

“Huh,” Darcy says out loud. In her brain, she says, _::It’s… nice to meet you, I guess? Did James tell you about me getting wiped? Sorry I don’t remember.::_

_::Not to worry,::_JARVIS assures her. _::We all understand – myself and the rest of your teammates, that is – and we will all do our best to accommodate your loss of memory.::_

_::Thanks,:: _Darcy says, and then looks up at James again. “Well, _that’s_ weird.”

“That’s what you said last time, too,” James agrees easily. He leans back in the chair and shifts her so that she’s turned, sitting sideways on his legs and leaning against his torso. He hasn’t wanted to let go of her since their reunion in Shuri’s lab and honestly, she hasn’t wanted to let go of him, either.

She settles easily against him. “So now what?” she asks.

“We’ll go back to New York,” James replies. “Shuri’s going to study your brain scans, and she and the neurologists here might be able to figure out a way to reverse the wipes; otherwise, we’ll wait to see if your brain heals on its own. Mine did.”

“Hmm.” She closes her eyes, tucking her forehead against the side of his neck. “Okay.”

He hums questioningly. “Okay?”

“Sure,” she replies. “I – Chefchen.” She sits up, turning to face him. “I don’t care where we go as long as we’re together.” She smiles slightly. “Shuri wants us to stay until she can build me a new eye – I think she’s taking it as a personal challenge. But after that? We could go to New York or Hong Kong or Yakutsk for all I care. As long as you go with me, I don’t care where I go.”

“I don’t want to go to Yakutsk,” James replies. “It’s too cold there.”

“Agreed,” Darcy replies promptly. “I’m only saying if we _did._”

“Well, let’s not.” He tugs her in and kisses her. Then his hands slide around her waist and begin to pluck at the straps of her armor. “Shuri doesn’t want you back today, does she?”

“I don’t think so,” Darcy says, reaching down and unbuckling the first strap. “You’ll have to find me something to wear later, though,” she warns him.

He laughs low in his throat, leaning in to kiss his way down her neck. “I’m sure I can manage that.”

~*~

It takes Shuri a couple of weeks to design what she says is “the perfect ocular prosthetic,” but when she does, it’s _amazing_. It’s made of vibranium so it’s actually more lightweight than the last one – Darcy can feel the difference. It still connects via USB, since Shuri’s neurologists were reluctant to change the connections without considerably more study of the existing ones, but Darcy’s fine with that. She’s also _astonished _at the new capabilities.

The x-ray function is twice as good as it was before; the infrared scanner is incredibly sharp and smooth. The night vision is so perfect that she would almost swear she was standing in daylight if not for the lack of color. Best of all, she now has an _audio _connection that renders her able to both hear and speak without the need for any kind of communications device.

“Seriously?” Darcy asks, laughing. “You put a phone in my _eye?_”

“Not just a phone!” Shuri assures her. It will also connect to your team’s communications frequencies. You will no longer need the earbud to communicate with them during a fight!”

“How the hell did you even do that?” James asks, leaning in to examine Darcy’s prosthetic. It doesn’t even have that telltale glimmer anymore; it looks exactly like her biological eye in every detail.

“Bone conduction,” Shuri explains. She pulls up a schematic on the screen to show them. “The sound travels through the bones of the skull instead of through the air. It will actually sound a little different; voices might have a slightly different pitch, for example. But the sound will be as clear as always, and you’ll never lose it.”

“Where did you even get the idea?” Darcy wonders.

Shuri grins, pulling up a different schematic and pointing at it while she speaks. “This is a bone conduction hearing aid,” she explains. “It’s used for certain types of congenital bone malformations. For example, in some cases of Treacher-Collins syndrome, deafness can be caused not because of any problem with the auditory nerves, but rather because of malformation of the cranio-facial bones. In such a case, a patient will be best served by the use of a bone conduction hearing aid unit. I took that technology and integrated it into your eye.”

Darcy stares in astonishment. “Uh,” she finally manages. “Wow.”

James frowns slightly. “I don’t mean to sound critical,” he says slowly, “but you guys are keeping this tech to yourselves?”

“Oh, bone conduction hearing aids are a widespread technology,” Shuri says breezily. “We didn’t design them; I just took the idea and reworked it.”

“I understand your concern,” says T’Challa from behind them; all three of them jump slightly in startlement, and he grins. “Yes, Wakanda has always been insular and we have always kept our technology out of the hands of outsiders and colonizers. But… I share your concerns. So much medical technology that we have, for example, could be used to help people all over the world. If we understood your prosthetic eye better, perhaps we could eventually cure blindness.” He shrugs. “It takes time to change the thinking of millennia, but one of my goals as king is to bring some of our wonders to the rest of the world. I believe it is time for us to stop hiding behind the screen of the goat herder and come into our own as a major player on the world stage.”

James nods. “You’d become one of the richest countries on the planet overnight with some of this tech,” he says.

“And possibly put a lot of major companies out of business,” T’Challa replies. “Not that I think the destruction of rampant Western capitalism would be a bad thing, you understand,” he adds with a bit of a smirk. “But it would be a bad idea to collapse the economies of other countries. They tend to resent that sort of thing.”

“An excellent point,” Darcy comments.

T’Challa nods. “I like to think so.” He smiles, reaching out to clap James on the shoulder. “But come, both of you; if I let her, Shuri will keep you here all night, and it is time to eat. Shuri, Mother insists that you come along as well.”

Shuri sighs, rolling her eyes. “Very well, Brother,” she responds. She types quickly on the screens, locking up her data.

“Can you send that to me?” Darcy asks. “I keep a file of the schematics of our tech.” She taps her temple. “That way if anything happens…”

“Oh, of course,” Shuri replies. “As long as you promise to keep them away from Tony Stark.”

Darcy laughs. “A promise easily made. I don’t even know who Tony Stark is.”

And James laughs as well, a little bit darkly. “You will.”

~*~

**March 2014**

**New York, NY**

The little aircar settles down on the landing pad at the top of Avengers Tower, and James and Darcy climb out, each carrying a backpack full of the few possessions they either arrived in Wakanda with or collected during their stay. They get out of the way quickly and then wave goodbye to the pilot, who waves cheerfully back before taking off again and zipping away from the tower.

“C’mon,” James says to Darcy when she hesitates on the balcony. “They’re waiting. Don’t worry; they already like you, and you’ll like them.”

“Yeah, okay,” Darcy replies. She’s faced scarier situations than this, after all.

James leads her into a large, open room. One side of the room is given over to a comfortable entertainment space, with a huge television and comfortable seating; another side, near a large kitchen, boasts a long dining table. There is a corner lined with bookshelves and set with several comfortable-looking seats –

And there are people. Several people.

One of them, a small brown-haired woman, starts forward, but is caught and held by the tall, blond man who stands next to her. Darcy has a feeling this must be the “Jane” that Bucky has told her about; she would be the one, he said, who would have the most trouble understanding and dealing with Darcy’s memory loss.

Darcy swallows hard, but James squeezes her hand, drawing her along with him. “Hey, everybody. Darcy, this is Tony, Natasha, Steve, Clint, Sam, Thor, and Jane.” He pauses. “Where’s Bruce?”

“He went to a conference in Michigan,” Jane says. “He’s supposed to be back tomorrow.”

Darcy blinks at the red-haired woman. “Natalia?”

“It’s Natasha these days,” Natasha says with a slight smile. “Good to have you back with us.”

Darcy shrugs. “Hopefully at some point I’ll remember that. James says his memories started to come back with time, so…” She looks around at the group. “So yeah. Sorry I don’t remember you all, but hopefully eventually I will.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sam tells her. “Believe me, some days I wish I could _forget_ this bunch of jokers.”

Darcy laughs. The ice thus broken, they’re suddenly all a little more comfortable with each other. “Hey, let’s watch a movie,” Clint says. “I’ll make popcorn.”

“I’ll help,” Steve says, and the two men disappear into the kitchen together.

James smiles a little. “That’s Steve,” he says to Darcy, leading her over to sit on one of the loveseats near the television. “I told you about him. Clint’s his soul mate. They’re just about joined at the hip these days.”

“Can’t say I blame them,” Darcy replies, grinning as she leans into James’s side.

James chuckles, pulling her closer. The others begin to grab seats, ranging all around, and James explained some of the dynamics in a low voice as the others spoke. “Tony’s soulmate is Pepper; she’s the CEO of Stark Industries, and she’s obviously working right now, so she’ll be up later. You’ll like her; she makes fire. Jane and Thor are soulmates, too – and Thor’s not even from Earth, he’s from another planet called Asgard. Clint and Steve, I told you about them. Bruce’s soulmate is another scientist called Betty Ross; she’s probably going to be moving here within the year. She’s teaching at Culver University right now.”

Darcy nods, committing the information to memory. “What about you, Natal – Natasha?” she asks, cocking an eyebrow at her old – friend? – acquaintance. “Have you found your soul mate yet?”

“Not yet,” Natasha replies. “But one day. I’m in no hurry.”

Darcy smiles. “When it happens, it won’t matter that you had to wait.”

“So I’ve heard,” Natasha replies, smiling back. “Still, not all of us can be so lucky as to find our soulmate at thirteen.”

Darcy blinks, looking up at James. “Thirteen?” she asks. “Really?”

James nods. “You remember Aronov, from Istanbul?”

“Vaguely,” Darcy says.

“Well, when we were – when HYDRA woke us up, the time I told you about, when we left them for good – he gave us our files from Department X. That’s how we found out who we were before. That I was James Barnes, that you were Darcy Lewis. Part of the information included was how we met. You were thirteen and you stumbled on me doing a hit.”

Darcy winces. “That must have been messy.”

“Quite,” James replies, laughing. “I told you I couldn’t possibly have a soulmate and I hurt your feelings badly enough that you mouthed off to an undercover HYDRA agent and – well. I’ll tell you the whole story later, if you want to hear it.”

“I do,” Darcy agrees.

“Hey, I want to hear it,” Tony said. “I haven’t ever heard how you two met.”

“Ain’t for tender ears, Stark,” James replies. “Unless you really wanna hear what HYDRA can do with a thirteen-year-old kid.”

There’s a moment of silence while Tony goes a little funny around the edges. “Okay, maybe I don’t want to hear it,” he admits.

“I didn’t think so,” James replies. Then he turns a little and calls over his shoulder. “What’s the holdup on that popcorn? You two start makin’ out and forget what you were doin’?”

Everyone laughs at that, even Darcy, and Steve leans around the kitchen doorway to give them all the finger. “We’re almost done,” he says. “Hold your damn horses.”

“Ooh, Steve said a bad language word!” Natasha exclaims, and everyone else laughs.

Steve rolls his eyes and disappears back into the kitchen. A minute or so later, he and Clint come back out with huge bowls of popcorn, and Sam puts on a movie called _The Lord of the Rings, _and everyone settles in to watch it.

Darcy enjoys the movie very much – that she remembers, she’s never really had the leisure to sit and simply consume media this way. Pepper comes in halfway through and is very gracious in introducing herself to Darcy, then joins them to watch the rest of the film.

They watch a second film – also _The Lord of the Rings, _but more so – and there’s talk of putting on “the third” but many of them are just tired and ready to turn in, so the decision is made to watch the third film tomorrow. They all begin to scatter to different places, but as James and Darcy are waiting at the elevator, they’re stopped by Thor.

“I’d like to speak with you both tomorrow,” he says. “I cannot swear to it, but I believe that I may have a solution to your memory troubles.”

Darcy feels her eyebrows climb up to her hairline. “Okay,” she says. “Sure. Thanks, Thor.”

He smiles slightly. “Don’t thank me yet,” he says. “Wait until we know for sure if my idea will work.”

James nods. “We’ll talk to you tomorrow, then,” he says. “Good night.”

“Sleep well, my friends,” Thor says, then slings his arm around Jane’s shoulders and leads her off toward the other elevator.


	6. Chapter 6

**March 2014**

**New York, NY**

Thor is waiting for them in the common room when they come upstairs the next morning. They declined to join team breakfast, preferring to spend that time alone together, but Darcy is very curious to hear what Thor has to say about possibly fixing her memory.

He’s sitting at the end of the dining table with a StarkPad in his hands, poking at it with a thoughtful expression, when they arrive, and he turns it off and sets it aside to smile at them. “Good morning, my friends,” he says. “Have you eaten?”

James nods. “Yeah, we had eggs and stuff downstairs.”

“There are leftovers from this morning, if you get hungry again,” Thor tells them. “In the meantime, please sit with me. I would like to share my idea with you.”

They come and sit down, one on either side of him, and Darcy puts her chin on her fist. “I’m listening,” she says. “Anything that can help would be appreciated, since right now I can’t remember _anything._”

Thor smiles slightly. “Well,” he says. “I assume you’re aware that I come from a place called Asgard.” Darcy nods, and he continues, “Our technology there is very… well. From your perspective, Jane has often said that it is so advanced as to seem like magic.”

“It really does,” James agrees. To Darcy, he adds, “Thor once brought some examples of some children’s toys to show us. They were _amazing. _Like nothin’ I’ve ever seen.”

Darcy nods. “So,” she says, “super-advanced tech.”

“Yes,” Thor says. “And I believe that there may be an answer to your memory problems with our healers. We have ways of repairing the brain – well, we are a warlike race, and repairing the smashed-in brain of an idiot is sometimes necessary.”

Darcy laughs. “It sounds like you know from experience.”

“I fell off a horse once,” Thor admits. “I was a child at the time. I landed directly on my head and split my skull open. Here on Earth I would have died of my injury; Asgard’s healers had me up and walking the next day.”

Darcy blinked in surprise at this information. “Wow,” she says finally. “It… it sounds like they’re pretty good at what they do.”

Thor nods. “I believe that if we tell them what was done to you, they might be able to repair the damage.” Then his eyes flick over to James. “And yours, too, if you like.”

James goes very still. “Mine?”

Thor nods. “I’ve heard you mention in the past that there are still gaps in your memories,” he says. “I believe that these could be repaired.”

“You keep saying you think and you believe,” Darcy points out. “But you’re not sure.”

“I am not,” Thor admits. “You would need to be examined.”

Darcy tilts her head a little bit. “So we’d have to go to Asgard.”

“Yes,” Thor says simply.

“Hell, I’m in just for the chance to go to Asgard,” James said immediately. “I know folks that would cut their left arm off for a chance to see that place.” Then he grins, waggling his metal fingers.

Thor laughs. “Fortunately, that won’t be required. So, what do you think? Would you like to give it a chance?”

Darcy and James eyeball each other across the table, and Darcy finally shrugs. “I’m game,” she says. “I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, they say they can’t help? No worse off then than I am now.”

“Got a point,” James agrees. He looks over at Thor. “When do we go?”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Thor replies.

~*~

**March 2014**

**Asgard**

Traveling the Bifrost is an experience in itself; Darcy almost wishes she was the journaling type so that she’d have an excuse to sit down and try to write about the gorgeous view of stars and galaxies that is visible just beyond the incredible shafts of rainbow light that surrounded them as they speed across space and possibly through alternate dimensions before arriving in Asgard.

They touch down almost gently on the marble floor of a huge golden room, one wall of which is given over to a view of space and the other to what appears to be a bridge made up entirely of a solid version of the same rainbow light that had made up the Bifrost itself. In the center of the room, a huge dark-skinned man with golden eyes stands at some kind of – Darcy can only call it a contraption: a golden half-globe that rests on the floor with a huge sword sticking out of the top.

He pulls the sword out of the globe and sheathes it, then gives a slight bow. “My prince.”

“Heimdall!” Thor exclaims, crossing the room to clasp arms with the man. “My friends, come and meet Heimdall. Heimdall, I present to you James Barnes and Darcy Lewis.”

Heimdall gives them both a solemn nod, which they return in greeting. “I have seen some of your adventures,” he tells them. “I occasionally look in on our prince while he spends time in your realm.”

“Oh, well,” James says. “Give a shout and say hello next time.”

Heimdall smiles. “Perhaps I will.”

Laughing now, Thor reaches out and claps both James and Darcy on the shoulders, turning them toward the bridge. “Come,” he says. “Let’s go into the city to the Houses of Healing and see what they have to say.”

“Nice to meet you, Heimdall!” Darcy calls over her shoulder as she and James are led away.

They cross the bridge, Darcy repeatedly leaning out to take in the beauty of the cosmos on the other side of all that rainbow light. Thor, grinning, only warns her once not to fall off; James is more nervous about it, repeatedly tugging her back from the edge. At last she takes pity on him and comes to the center of the bridge, wrapping her arm around his waist and looking forward to take in the splendor of the great city they’re approaching.

“It’s very shiny,” Darcy comments.

“We have ever been fond of brilliance and grandeur,” Thor replies, nodding. “It’s perhaps a trifle overdone, but we like it.”

James laughs. “There’s a lot of gold,” he admits.

“There is,” Thor says, laughing as well. “And diamond paned windows to make the sun shine brilliantly.”

“I like it,” Darcy says, reaching out to pat Thor on the shoulder. “It’s the kind of fancy I would expect from a guy like you.”

Once they get into the city, there’s less gold but no less beauty; the buildings are all built of similar-looking yellowish stone carved with beautiful patterns; there are public squares and beautiful parks and fountains everywhere they look; children play in the streets while adults go about their business, filling the marketplaces and passing in and out of doors.

Darcy feels a little like her head is on a swivel; she keeps turning and, frankly, gawking as she tries to take it all in. “This is amazing,” she murmurs to James, squeezing his hand. “Chefchen, I think this is the best place you’ve ever taken me.”

James laughs. “I think this time _you_ brought us,” he tells her, “but I also think you’re right about how beautiful it is.”

As they pass through the city, Thor points out sights and sites of interest; here is a fountain in the likeness of his grandfather Bors; there is a building where an important peace treaty was once signed. He tells them some of the history of Asgard and about their self-appointed role as peacekeepers of the Nine Realms.

Darcy wisely keeps behind her teeth a comment about his self-described “warlike race” appointing themselves peacekeepers. Peace at the point of a sword isn’t freedom; it’s fear.

_Where did I hear that before?_

She shakes her head briefly to clear it, focusing on Thor’s voice once more.

They sit for awhile in one of the parks, Thor regaling them with a tale of himself and his favorite compatriots – Lady Sif and the Warriors Three – and Darcy takes a moment to gingerly open her wi-fi connection.

She’d thought there was a lot to sort through when she reopened it after her wipe; that was _nothing_ compared to this. The sheer volume of information that comes pouring in through her implant is _insane_ and she struggles to close the connection before she can become completely lost in it.

It only took a couple of seconds, but Darcy finds that she is pale and sweating by the time she gets under control, and Thor and James are both looking at her with concern. “I’m okay,” she manages. “Just. Tried to open my connection. Bad idea.”

“It was, indeed, a bad idea,” a woman’s voice says from their right, and all three of them start slightly before turning and rising to greet the very regal looking woman who has approached them.

“Mother,” Thor says, stepping forward to embrace the woman. He turns then and says, “Mother, these are my friends and shield-sibs James and Darcy. James and Darcy, this is my mother, Frigga.”

Both James and Darcy give awkward little bows, aware that they’re addressing the queen of Asgard, and she smiles at them, taking their hands and shaking them warmly. “Welcome to Asgard,” she says. “Heimdall sent me a message that you were coming. He says healing is required.”

“Well, we’re hoping you can help,” Darcy says. “I’ve had my brain wiped, and if there’s any way for it to be undone, Thor says you’d know that way.”

“We’ll take a look and see what can be done,” Frigga replies. She takes Darcy’s arm. “Thor, you may find us later at the Houses of Healing. Show Asgard to your friend; introduce him to Volstagg and the others. You won’t be needed for now.” And, firmly, she leads Darcy away.

~*~

The Houses of Healing are unlike anything Darcy might have expected. They resemble Shuri’s lab or any of the Department X facilities in absolutely no way. There are holoscreens, which she expected, and there are arcane instruments, which she expected, but none of them resemble anything she’s ever seen before in any way.

They put her into a diagnostic machine they call a Soul Forge, and she watches as a holographic representation of her own body appears in the air above her. She narrows her eyes, studying the rendering of her brain, but when she reaches up to poke at it, she gets her hand firmly placed back down on the table. “You’ll disrupt the field,” Frigga tells her, and the various healers gather around, _hmm_-ing at the hologram.

“How was this done?” One of the healers asks.

“Oh, they have a chair,” Darcy says. “They strap you down in it and run electricity through your head and then you don’t remember any more. At least, you don’t remember the things they don’t want you to remember. Past missions, orders, things like that, I remember, but there’s apparently three or so years when I wasn’t _theirs _that they took away from me.”

There’s more humming around the table, this time with a disapproving tone. “Thor didn’t tell us that was happening,” Frigga says.

“In his defense,” Darcy explains, “he didn’t know about it. James says we thought all the chairs had been destroyed. He isn’t sure where this one came from that they used on me recently. They’re in the process of trying to find it so it can be destroyed as well.”

That gets a more approving sound, before the conversation turns back to the hologram and what might need to happen to repair the apparently very visible damage.

It takes some time in which Darcy is talked over and around and only occasionally _to, _but eventually the red field is banished and she’s allowed to sit up. “All right,” one of the healers says, pulling over a stool and sitting down in front of her. “Here’s what we know.”

~*~

“So it’s physical damage,” Darcy relayed to James later that evening in the little apartment Thor had shown them to. “That’s why it heals up after awhile. But they said that even with my enhanced healing it could take years to get everything back, and honestly, I don’t want to wait that long. I want to be _me _again. I want my memories.”

James nods, clambering onto the bed and to stretch out and lean his torso against the headboard. “Makes sense,” he says. “Especially with the way our memories came back before. I wondered if the difference had to do with the serum; they wiped you a couple times before you got the serum, and I bet you never really had a chance to heal from that, which is why you haven’t got much back from your childhood.”

Darcy hums, settling beside him. “They think they can get all of that back. When they do what they’re gonna do, I mean.”

“How’s it work?” James asks. “The healing thing.”

“It’s a stasis,” Darcy replies. “Like cryo, I guess, but without the cold. And it speeds up healing. So you go in one day all broken or whatever and you come out another day peachy keen.”

“When you say _another day,_” James says slowly, turning to study her, “how many days are we talking?”

“They’re not sure yet,” Darcy replies. “Probably a couple of weeks.” She shrugs. “I’ll find out more tomorrow before they put me in.”

“Before they – what?” He sits up, turning to face her.

“Before they put me in,” Darcy repeats. She sits up as well. “Did you think I wasn’t going to do it? James, I want my memories back! I want what that son of a bitch Rumlow took from me, and if I can get back what HYDRA and Department X took, I want that, too! Of course I’m gonna do it!”

“Without even talking to me?” he says, aghast. “I thought we were a team!”

“Of course we are!” Darcy exclaims. Then she stops, staring at him in shock. “Do – do you not want me to do this?”

“I mean…” He pauses, searching for words. “I thought we’d at least talk about it first.”

“What else is there to talk about?” she asks, still staring at him. “They can fix it. I want them to fix it. They’re going to do the thing that fixes it tomorrow.”

“But – but cryo?” James stutters. “Two _weeks?!_”

She’s still for a moment, then reaches out to cup his cheek with her hand. “Chefchen,” she says softly, “it’ll be okay. You can do without me for a few days.”

He reaches out and tugs her into his lap, curling himself around her. “I just did,” he says into her hair, shuddering slightly as she wraps her arms around him. “I just did without you for three months, and I hated every second of it. I don’t ever want to be without you again, кукла.”

“It’s not long, Chefchen,” she murmurs. “I promise.” She turns to kiss him gently. “I need to be better,” she says softly.

“You’re fine like you are,” he protests, but it’s weak and they both know it. She just shakes her head at him, and he sighs, leaning in to kiss her again. “I don’t like it,” he says quietly, his lips brushing her cheek as he speaks. “But I want you to be happy.”

“You will always make me happy, Chefchen,” she promises him.

He lays her back on the bed then and they make each other happy, for as long as they can manage. When they’re sated, he curls around her, holding her close, and he buries his nose behind her ear before closing his eyes to sleep.

~*~

She stands in front of the device – they told her the name of it, but she doesn’t care – and studies it for a minute. It doesn’t look a thing like a cryo tube – and yet, it looks _exactly _like a cryo tube.

She takes a deep breath, then turns to give James a smile. “Don’t look so dejected,” she tells him, pulling him in for a kiss. “It won’t be long.”

“From your perspective,” he replies, a little grumbly. “From mine it could be forever.”

“You have my word, James of Midgard, that she will be in the Sleep Chamber for no more than six days.” One of the healers smiles gently, touching his shoulder. “My word as a healer and as an Asgardian.”

For an Asgardian to give their word means a lot, and it actually helps James relax – Darcy can feel his muscles let go just a little bit under her hands. She smiles a little wider. “There you go,” she says softly. “Now. The sooner I go, the sooner I’m back, hmm?”

“All right,” he murmurs. He tugs her close and kisses her hard. “I love you, you know.”

“I know,” she promises. “I love you, too, you know.”

“I know.” He smiles a little. “Go, before I decide I’m not going to let you.”

With a nod she goes. She steps into the upright Sleep Chamber and turns to face the room. “All right,” she says. “I’m ready.”

Frigga walks over and gives her a smile. “You’ll be perfectly fine,” she says softly. “I promise.”

“I trust you,” Darcy says, nodding once.

Frigga raises a hand and runs it across the air in front of Darcy’s face; a gentle red force field begins to glow around her. She looks down at it, then up at James. “It’s not cold,” she tells him, smiling.

He moans, just a little bit, and she starts to say something else, but quite suddenly her entire body relaxes. Something she can’t see is holding her up, but she’s falling asleep. The last thing she sees is his face, and then her eyes flutter gently closed.


	7. Chapter 7

**March 2014**

**Asgard**

Darcy wakes slowly, feeling pleasantly heavy and relaxed. She raises her arms above her head and stretches hard with a long, low moan of pleasure, then relaxes again. Then she realizes that her hands never hit the headboard, nor did she encounter James, and both of those things are odd. She opens her eyes.

“Oh,” she says, and sits up, swinging her legs off the side of the table and rubbing at her eyes. “Wow,” she says to the healer who is standing next to her. “That might be the best sleep I’ve had in my life.”

The healer laughs softly. “I have heard many say the same thing of the Sleep Chamber,” he assures Darcy. “Come, can you stand? Your beloved is waiting quite anxiously.”

“Oh, jeez,” Darcy says, sliding to her feet. She wobbles for a second, then steadies, then stretches again. “Where is he?”

“Just outside in the garden,” the healer replies. “Come, I’ll take you there.”

Outside in the garden is, in fact, an actual garden: it’s got shrubs and flowers and paved walking paths and benches and is, overall, a lovely and peaceful place. Except for James, who is a bundle of nerves and nervous energy standing about ten feet away from the door that the healer leads Darcy out through.

“кукла!” he exclaims, stepping toward her, his hands outstretched.

“Chefchen!” she calls back, darting toward him and wrapping her arms around him. “The next time I get the bright idea to download an AI into my brain, kick my ass, hmm?”

James chokes on tears and laughter at the same time, squeezing her tight. “You’ve got your memories back.”

“Yes, thank Lenin,” Darcy replies, squeezing back. “I know you didn’t like it, but I’m so glad I did it. I’ve changed a lot over the last three years, and I’m glad I have.”

He sets her back a little bit, hands on her shoulders, and looks into her eyes. “You have,” he admits. “You’ve always been more girl than woman, but you’ve grown a lot into yourself the last few years, and you’d have been very different.”

Darcy nods. She turns to the healer, who’s still hovering by the door, and goes back to him, hand out to do the traditional Asgardian arm clasp. “Thank you,” she says. “You and everyone else who helped me.”

He smiles. “You’re very welcome,” he says. “We want to see you bright and early tomorrow morning so we can check you over before you go home.”

She nods. “Can do.”

He goes back inside, and she returns to James. “So yeah, this has been an adventure.”

“That’s one word for it,” he says sourly, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm and leading her off on an amble of the garden. “Talk to me, кукла, tell me what happened.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay, so I disconnected from the web and all, and Tony and I hooked me up to the ULTRON server. I was watching it, and when it clicked, I woke right up – but it went bad, like, _immediately. _I didn’t have a chance in hell of stopping it. I think it was that damn scepter – we shouldn’t have messed with it. We didn’t understand it and we had no business doing what we did.”

“I’ll agree with that,” James says. “But nobody has any room to censure; we all talked about it together as a group and we decided as a group that it was worth trying.”

Darcy nods. “Yeah. So anyway, the damn thing climbed into my head and somehow managed to get physical control over my body. I have no idea how, so don’t even ask me to try and explain. It’s like… I don’t know how to describe it. At first I was just talking to it the way I talk to JARVIS and then it was like a bomb went off and the next thing I knew, it was controlling me.”

“I saw the footage of you leaving the Tower,” James offers.

Darcy nods. “You saw the sign, then?” she asks. When he nods, she says, “I didn’t want you thinking I’d gone off somewhere and abandoned you.”

He stops walking for a second, leaning down to kiss her. “I would never think that,” he says softly. “Not unless you told me to my face that you were leaving.”

She smiles. “And I will never leave you, Chefchen,” she murmurs. Then she guides them to start walking again. “So,” she continues, “ULTRON went rifling through my memories and decided it wanted to go visit that last HYDRA base we raided. It wanted to know how I was made.”

James shudders. “It wanted to know about the chair and all.”

“Exactly.” Darcy nods. “But when we got there, the place had been ransacked; all the hard drives were gone from the computers and everything. There was nothing left. So it decided to take over completely – to see if it could drive, I guess.”

“And?” he asks, with a dreadful certainty already forming in his mind.

“And it could,” she replies. “There’s huge sections of time that I just have no accounting for because it was in charge. I _do _have GPS tracking, though, so some of its movements can probably be reconstructed. But I woke up a few times. One of them was in a Hammer lab.”

“Hammer?” James exclaims.

Darcy nods. “Hammer. As in Hammer-working-with-AIM-working-with-HYDRA-according-to-that-one-guy.”

“Oh, it’s time to put them out of business,” James growls.

“With prejudice,” Darcy agrees. “But we’ve got to find out what they already know first. I have no idea how long I was in their labs or what they learned about me while I was there.”

“Sounds like a job for our industrial espionage department.”

“You mean Natasha?” Darcy replies, laughing. “She’ll be all over this.”

He guides her to a bench under a trellis and they sit, leaning against one another in the sunshine. “So then what happened?”

“I called you,” Darcy replies. “I was actually in the Hammer lab when I called you. And so whatever happened on your end happened, and whatever it was, ULTRON was _not_ happy about it.”

“Tony unplugged him,” James reports. “Literally walked into the server room and pulled the plug out of the wall.”

“That’s one way to skin a cat,” Darcy muses. “I assume he wiped the server afterward?”

“He says he took it completely apart and ran it under an electromagnet.”

“No more ULTRON,” Darcy says, nodding in approval. “Good.” She sighs softly. “Well. After that, somehow or another – I have no idea, because I was not driving for this part – I ended up getting handed over to Brock Rumlow.”

“Bastard,” James growls. “Let me find him. Just once.”

“INTERPOL has him,” Darcy tells him. “T’Challa handed him over.”

“Not good enough,” James grumbles, but he subsides when Darcy chuckles and leans up to kiss his cheek.

“_Anyway,_” Darcy continues, “Rumlow had me wiped. He was going for a full on blank slate, but somehow he just ended up with the regular protocol instead. It didn’t matter; I recognized him as Handler, so that was good enough for him. He had his Technician try to figure out a blank slate protocol but it wasn’t a priority since I was compliant.”

“You said you were looking for me,” he murmurs. “In Wakanda.”

She nods. “I asked him about you a few times, and he kept putting me off; by the time month three rolled around and I hadn’t so much as seen you in your cryotube, I knew something was wrong. So when everything went south in Madripoor, I gave him one last chance to give you to me. Of course he couldn’t, and so I handed him over to the Wakandans.”

James laughs. “This is why we don’t break agreements with our assets.”

“Exactly,” Darcy says, a little smug. “Anyway, I made a deal with T’Challa – I’d give him back the stolen vibranium Rumlow was after if he’d get me out of Madripoor; I was about to start hunting you in earnest. And then you showed up, and you know the rest.”

He wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in tight. “That’s a hell of an adventure, кукла.”

“Tell me about it,” Darcy replies, her tone sour. “Don’t think it’s one I ever want to repeat, though.”

“Definitely not.”

“So what did you do while I was out traveling the world and shooting more people?”

He laughs. “I followed you,” he says. “At first we had no idea where to even start looking. JARVIS tracked you via traffic cams until you were out of the city but then you were just…” He waves an expressive hand. “Gone.”

She gives him an encouraging noise and snuggles tighter against him.

“So then you called, and JARVIS tracked the call – that lab’s in Seattle, by the way – but we weren’t able to pinpoint your location. And of course there was all the business with dismantling the ULTRON server and all the shouting and the fighting.”

“The what?” Darcy exclaims, sitting up to stare at him.

“Lot of fighting,” James confirms, nodding. “Whose fault was it, what should be done, blah-di-blah.”

Darcy’s brows draw together. “We’ll have to address that when we get back,” she says. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault; or it was all of our faults. Nobody needs to take the blame.”

“Well, Tony took it pretty hard,” James admits. “I didn’t fault him, though; you volunteered, and he was doing his dead level best to help find you.”

“How _did_ you find me?”

He smiles. “You connected to the wi-fi in Lucerne,” he says.

“Ohh,” she breathes. “Of course. And you were able to follow my movements from there.”

He nods. “I’d have caught up with you sooner if you’d just stayed still,” he complains.

She laughs. “Rumlow kept us on the move. I think I know why now – I think he walked away from HYDRA after D.C. and went freelance. They tend to frown on that kind of thing.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Lucerne was my first clue, actually,” Darcy replies. “The hit was ordered by Victor von Doom.”

“Oh, _that’s _useful information to have,” James murmurs.

“That’s not the only one, either,” Darcy tells him. “There was a second hit inside Latveria itself. Also courtesy of Victor.”

“Yeah, we tracked you all over the place,” James tells her.

She nods. “I did, what, ten hits? Something like that?” She shrugs. “I’m not losing sleep over any of them. Assholes ridding the world of other assholes.”

He laughs softly. “Кукла, if we lost sleep every time we ended somebody, neither one of us would ever sleep again.”

“Boy, if that ain’t a fact,” she agrees. “So you tracked me to Wakanda?”

He nods. “Tony dropped me off just outside the border and I went in to the village there, and I gave them your coordinates and then they brought me in to Birnin Zana. And damn if _that _place wasn’t a surprise.”

“Right?” Darcy agrees. “I had no idea the Wakandans were so advanced.”

“Nobody does,” James says. “We even talked about the fact that we thought they were just dirt grubbers and there was no way you’d be able to stay under the radar there.”

“Well, you were right about the second part,” Darcy laughs. “Dirt grubbers, not so much.”

“Tony would lose his mind if he saw the inside of Shuri’s workshop,” James comments

“Tony would lose his mind if he saw what she did with my eye,” Darcy agrees. Then she sighs. “All right,” she says, standing up and pulling him to his feet as well. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving for some breakfast. Feed me, Chefchen.”

~*~

“Everything is progressing wonderfully,” Frigga says as she examines the readouts from the Soul Forge the next morning. “Had we left you in the Sleep Chamber longer, your healing would be more advanced, but we promised no more than six days, and six days we delivered.”

Darcy smiles. “I don’t think he could have taken it any longer,” she admits.

Frigga laughs. “He was quite agitated while you were asleep.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t stand over me the whole time,” Darcy says.

“He tried to,” Frigga replies, a wry twist to her lips. “Thor dragged him out.”

Darcy laughs. “Good for Thor; I’ll have to think of a way to thank him later.”

“I think the sight of James on horseback trying to throw a spear at a boar might be thanks enough,” Frigga replies. “Thor was full of tales of his valor when they returned from the hunt, but James had the look of a man who’s made acquaintance with the ground more than once.” With a wave, she dismisses the hologram and the red light that created it, and she gives Darcy a hand to sit up. “I pronounce you mostly healed,” she says. “What’s left to heal should do so on its own, over time.”

“Thank you,” Darcy says, reaching out to clasp Frigga’s hands in her own. “You didn’t have to help me, but you did, and I’m more grateful than you can know.”

Frigga smiles, squeezing Darcy’s hands. “I have never been in your position,” she says, “so I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to know that such a huge part of yourself has been lost. I’m grateful I was able to help restore you.”

“If there’s ever anything I can do to repay you,” Darcy tells her, “I’m in your debt.”

Frigga smiles. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

~*~

**March 2014**

**Avengers Compound, Upstate NY**

None of their friends even try to act casual when the Bifrost deposits Thor, James, and Darcy back on the ground outside the main building at the upstate compound. They come flying out of the building, gathering around and asking questions, talking over each other in various attempts to find out what had happened.

Darcy gives an ear-splitting whistle and, in the resulting silence, she says, “Everybody here deserves an ass-kicking, including myself, for doing what we did with ULTRON, because that was _fucking stupid _of us.”

There’s a long pause, and then everyone bursts out laughing.

A few minutes later, they’re all settled in the luxurious living area in the back of the main compound building, sharing take-out Chinese and stories of what happened while they were all separated. Darcy tells her side of things again, and there’s a general outcry when she gets to the part about Hammer.

“That guy _told_ us they were playing on the bad side,” Clint says, poking Steve in the shoulder. “We should have gone after them before now.”

“Well, better late than never,” Steve agrees. Then he turns back to Darcy. “So what else happened?”

She continues, through Rumlow and all the way up to the morning’s checkup in Asgard. “And Frigga pronounced me mostly healed, and so we came home, and now we’re here and I swear to _Stalin, _Chefchen, if you so much as _think _about reaching for my last egg roll I will stab you with these chopsticks.”

James, looking chastened, pulls his hand back. The others titter.

“_Anyway,_” Darcy says, winding up, “that’s the story.”

“I want in Hammer’s systems,” Tony says. “JARVIS, can you get to work on that?”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS replies.

Tony looks over at Natasha. “You want to play the industrial espionage card again?”

“Always,” Nat replies. “I’ll never _not_ want to play spy games.”

Darcy shrugs. “Better you than me,” she says. “I’m terrible at that kind of thing.”

“Yes,” Natasha agrees. “Yes, you are.”

Darcy sticks out her tongue at Natasha, who laughs.

“What about this other chair?” Steve asks. “I’m concerned about that.”

“Me, too,” James says. “We need to reconstruct Darcy’s movements while she was ULTRON and see if we can figure out where that base is that Rumlow was using.”

“We’ll start that tomorrow,” Darcy says. “Tonight I’m tired and I just want to hang out with my friends. Maybe watch _Return of the King,_ since we never got around to it before we went to Asgard.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Clint agrees. “Steve and I’ll make the popcorn.”


	8. Chapter 8

**April 2014**

**Seattle, WA**

Natalie Rushman breezes through the front doors of the lobby at Hammer Industries and up to the reception desk. “Good afternoon,” she says. “I’m Natalie Rushman. This is my assistant, Desiree Langston.” The brunette woman standing behind Natalie, nose deep in a StarkPad, glances up for a moment and flicks a finger at the receptionist in greeting. Natalie continues, “I have an appointment with Dr. Welter at 3:00.”

The receptionist types into her computer, then smiles at Natalie. “Of course, Ms. Rushman. Please have a seat, and someone will be here shortly to escort you up to the lab.”

“Thank you,” Natalie replies. She makes her way to a nearby seating area, followed by her assistant, and seats herself gracefully. The two of them begin to speak in very low voices.

“I’m in,” Darcy murmurs, tapping at her StarkPad. “Wow, what a pain in the ass this is.” Then she pauses and almost grins. “Pain in the brain.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “That was weak.” She leans over and glances at the screen of the StarkPad. “Just remember to let me do all the talking.”

“No worries,” Darcy replies. “I’m too busy digging through – ” she pauses, then shakes her head. “Nope, there’s a firewall there. Heavy duty. It’ll take too long to break through it; I’m definitely going to need to drop a hard line once we’re in the lab. Let’s hope Welter doesn’t recognize me before we get the door locked.”

“Don’t worry,” Natasha replies. “Just keep your face pointed at that pad; I’ll keep his attention on me.”

A few seconds later, they’re approached by a young, dark-skinned man in a lab coat. “Pardon me, Miss Rushman? I’m Danny Beaulieu. Dr. Welter asked me to come and get you and bring you up to the lab.”

Natasha gets to her feet smoothly, smiling, and Darcy follows her lead, still buried in the StarkPad. They take the elevator up, stopping at the twelfth floor, and Beaulieu leads them out and down a hall into a clinical laboratory with the number 42 on the door.

Darcy doesn’t even look around; she’s too busy downloading everything she can from the servers she can access and feeding it all back to JARVIS.

“Dr. Welter,” Beaulieu says, “this is Natalie Rushman and…” he pauses, raising an eyebrow at Natasha.

“My assistant, Desiree Langston,” Natasha says.

“Thank you, Danny. Go check on those readouts, will you?” Welter says without turning around.

Danny nods, turns, and leaves the lab. The door swings gently shut behind him. Darcy moves toward it and silently turns the lock.

“Well, now, Ms. Rushman,” Welter says, putting down whatever he’s working on and turning around, “How can I help – ” his voice trails off when he catches sight of Darcy, and the blood drains from his face. All thoughts of espionage go out the window; the plan changes immediately.

“You’ll be dead before you can scream,” Natasha warns him. “Don’t try it.”

Welter starts to breathe fast. “What are you here for?” he rasps. “I did everything that was asked of me!”

“Just a little information,” Darcy replies. “For example, I want every piece of information that you got from me the last time I was here. Every scan, every measurement, _everything._”

“And when you’re done with that,” Natasha says, “you’re going to tell us all about Brock Rumlow and how he got hold of a certain piece of equipment shaped like a chair.” She pauses as Welter goes so pale he almost turns green, and she nods with satisfaction. “I see you know what I’m talking about.”

“I had nothing to do with that!” Welter blurts, realizing that the game, for him, has changed. “I swear it!”

“You had a lot to do with it,” Darcy replies. “You and your lab mate – what’s his name?”

“Thornton!” Welter exclaims. “He’s the one! He’s the one who called Rumlow! It wasn’t me!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t stop him, did you?” Darcy asks softly. “And you didn’t do anything to help me escape, or to hide me, or anything else. In fact, I bet you helped.” She gives him a soft, humorless smile. “You get no sympathy from me, friend; I sat in the chair and they ran electricity through my head and they made me forget who I was. And now I’m going to pay them back. Them and you and everyone else who was involved.” She steps away from the door, moving toward Welter. “Now, I’m going to need a USB connection so I can drop a hard line into your system, I’m going to need passwords, and I’m going to need you sitting right over there with my friend, telling her everything you know before I decide whether or not to skin you alive. Hmm?”

Welter, his finger shaking, points to the nearest bank of computers with a USB dock. Darcy smiles again, pulling a cord out of her pocket, and goes to it. She pops her prosthetic out, connects directly to the Hammer servers, and begins to search, demanding passwords every time she needs one. Welter tries to demur once, but Natasha gives him a little poke with the point of a knife, and he stops demurring.

Darcy digs and digs and digs, streaming information back to JARVIS as fast as she can process it. With Welter’s directions, she navigates to the data that was collected on her, sending it back to JARVIS before nuking it off Hammer’s servers.

Meanwhile, Natasha pulls up a chair and sits down in front of Welter. She begins to ask questions in a quiet and reasonable voice.

“How long have you been part of HYDRA, Dr. Welter?” she asks.

“I’m not! I swear it! I’m AIM-affiliated, that’s all!”

“Mmm,” Natasha hums. “Could be true. You haven’t bitten down on a cyanide pill, after all.” She considers him. “Tell me what happened when my colleague came into your lab the first time.”

Welter pauses, swallows hard, and then sits forward. “It was so strange,” he says, glancing over at Darcy and shuddering at the sight of the cord running into her eye socket before turning back to Natasha. “The strangest thing I think I’ve ever seen. She came waltzing in like she lived here or something; I have no idea how she got in. But she came walking in and said she had hardware in her head and she wanted to know about it, and she was willing to let us copy the designs for ourselves if we’d tell her what it was and how it worked.”

Darcy snorts. “And of course you couldn’t turn _that _down.”

“Well of course not,” Welter replies in a reasonable tone. “Do you think Stark would, given the opportunity?”

Darcy looks over at him. “Would and did,” she replies simply. “He’s a better person than anyone gives him credit for. He’s certainly a better person than _you._” Then she turns back to her work again.

“So tell me what happened after you started running scans,” Natasha says smoothly, taking control of the conversation once more.

“We got about halfway through doing what we were doing,” Welter says, “doing the scans and stuff. And we’d just hit the part where we realized she had the capability to connect to the internet. But then – it was like she went berserk. Screaming something about being disconnected. We tried to calm her down and tell her we thought she could reconnect but she wasn’t hearing it – she just kept screaming _what did you do, what did you do _over and over. We had to get security to get her into a safe room.”

“You mean a cell,” Darcy corrects.

Welter shrugs. “Call it what you want.”

“Anyway,” Natasha says, redirecting again. “What happened then?”

“Thornton figured out who she was,” Welter replies. “That she was one of the Avengers, I mean. And he said that HYDRA had a standing bounty on any Avenger, but especially her and the guy with the metal arm. So he made some calls, and Rumlow showed up. He took her to Section C. And that’s the last I saw of either of them.”

“What’s Section C?” Natasha demands.

Welter shrugs, gesturing to the hallway. “It’s the other half of this floor,” he says. “It’s off limits to almost everybody; it’s basically top secret.”

Darcy straightens, turning slowly to face Welter. “Are you telling me the chair is _here?_”

~*~

“It’s here, Chefchen, the chair is _here,_” Darcy says into the comm. “It’s on the twelfth floor in some top secret area they call Section C.”

_“We’re on our way,”_James replies. _“What’s this doctor’s name?”_

“Welter,” Darcy tells him. “He’s not HYDRA, but he’s AIM, and AIM is still working with HYDRA.”

_“All right. We’re not wasting time with subterfuge; no need for it since you’ve already sent JARVIS everything there is to send. We’re just coming in the front doors.”_

“Sounds good,” Darcy tells him. “ETA?”

_“Five minutes,”_James replies. _“Behave til I get there.”_

“Har har,” Darcy replies, and closes the connection. Then she pulls up the CCTV feed from the cameras in the lobby, displaying it on one of the big screens. That done, she disconnects herself from the hard line, wipes the cord clean, and stuffs it back into her pocket before replacing her prosthetic eye. She turns to face Natasha and Welter. “All right,” she says. “We’re going to have company in about five minutes.”

“Oh, good,” Natasha says. “Coming in the front?” she asks, nodding toward the screen.

“Right through the main lobby,” Darcy confirms. “If you’ve got any follow up questions, now’s the time; it’s about to get really exciting around here.”

“No, I think he’s told us everything he knows that’s worth knowing. Between that and whatever we find in Section C, I’m pretty sure we’ll have enough to blow this whole shit shack sky high.” She pauses, then smirks at Welter. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Of course,” Darcy echoes.

Natasha’s phone rings; she pulls it out, checks the ID, and answers on speakerphone. “Sharon!”

“Hey, Nat,” Sharon’s voice comes through the speaker. “I hear you’ve got more HYDRA for us.”

“Hammer Industries’ Seattle location,” Natasha confirms. “And probably enough evidence to prove the tentacles are all the way through the whole mess.”

“Excellent,” Sharon replies. “I’ll get a team together and we’ll be on the way to do the mopping up.”

“You’re the best,” Natasha tells her and disconnects the call.

Darcy pulls out a pair of handcuffs, snapping one end around Welter’s wrist and the other around a protrusion in the bolted-down computer desk. “There,” she says. “Wouldn’t want you going anywhere before the CIA gets here.”

“Oh, come on!” Welter exclaims. “I told you everything I know! I gave you all the data!”

“You did,” Darcy replies, her expression serious. “And for that we are grateful.”

“Cut me some slack!”

Natasha twitches an eyebrow. “The same kind of slack you cut my colleague when you gave her up to HYDRA?” she asks.

Welter flinches backward. Darcy tilts her head. “Maybe we should take him with us,” she says to Natasha, her eyes never leaving Welter’s face. “Maybe we should show him just exactly what kind of slack he didn’t cut me. Like, we could put _him_ in the chair and see how _he _likes it.”

“No! Please!” Welter begs, going pale again. “Please, no! I have a family!”

Darcy leans toward him, just a little, and hisses, “So do I. That didn’t stop you.”

Natasha places a hand on Darcy’s shoulder and draws her away. “Don’t lose focus.”

Darcy laughs softly. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m apparently a little angry.”

“And not without cause,” Natasha says. “Just stay focused. Remember the mission. Anger is a liability.”

Darcy nods. Then she bares her teeth. “Гнев оружие твоего врага.”

“Anger is your enemy’s weapon,” Natasha repeats, nodding. “You remember your lessons, anyway.”

“It’s one I learned from you and Yelena,” Darcy says, her grimace modulating into a grin. “You never got angry, but Yelena always did. That’s why you always beat her.”

“Exactly,” Natasha replies. “I don’t know if she ever learned that lesson.”

Darcy shakes her head, then turns back to Welter. “You’re lucky my colleague knows me so well,” she tells him, “because personally, I’d like to have your balls in a jar.”

Movement on the screen catches her attention; she and Natasha both look up in time to see the front doors of the lobby open and the rest of the Avengers, in full costume, come strolling in. Security tries to stop them, but they’re just rent-a-cops, so they don’t try very hard. “Time to move,” Natasha says. She points a finger at Welter. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Darcy and Natasha leave the lab and head down the hallway toward the area known as Section C; the doors are closed and locked but they won’t be any match for James’s metal arm. The two women station themselves just outside the doors, ready and willing to handle anyone who comes out. No one does in the minute or so that it takes for the Avengers to assemble, and James opens the doors by force, just as Darcy had expected.

Alarms go off inside the secure area, but none of the Avengers are paying attention; their focus is completely caught by the huge HYDRA symbol painted on the floor just inside those doors.

**~*~**

“Well,” Steve says, staring down at the HYDRA logo painted on the floor. “I have to admit that I was not expecting that.”

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Tony replies. “But even less so the giant fucking HYDRA infestation.”

“Sharon’s people are going to have a field day with this,” Sam comments.

Darcy pulls out a handgun and chambers a round. “I’m done standing around,” she says. “Let’s rock and roll.”

They cross the threshold just as several guards come running toward them; the guards go down under the onslaught of shield and repulsors, and the Avengers make their way into the secure area, incapacitating any guards they see that aren’t actively shooting at them. The ones that do make the mistake of shooting don’t make that mistake twice.

The building intercom crackles to life with a voice announcing an intruder alert and a building-wide lockdown. The Avengers ignore this announcement as well as the continued alarms and split up, incapacitating guards and rounding up scientists and technicians as they go. It actually isn’t hard to round up the eggheads; most of them are utterly unused to being on the business end of weaponry and surrender almost immediately.

There are three casualties of cyanide pills. Otherwise, all the personnel seem to be low-level enough that they haven’t been issued the suicide option.

One scientist attempts to inject Natasha with something; he ends up with a broken arm and a cracked sternum (as well as several minutes unconscious and probably a concussion) for his trouble. A technician shouts a list of words at James in Russian, then moans in fear and surrenders when the only thing that happens is that James cocks his head and replies, “What the hell, lady?”

And then Clint finds the chair.

“Target acquired,” he says into his comm. “Back hallway, right hand side. It doesn’t look new, so I’m guessing they found it someplace and brought it here.”

“Great,” Darcy grumbles. “Back on the fucking hunt.”

“Language,” Tony sing-songs, and Steve groans while everyone else laughs. They converge on the room Clint found, and sure enough, there’s the chair and all the affiliated computer equipment.

James shudders softly. “I didn’t think I’d ever have to look at one of those again.”

“With any luck,” Thor says as Darcy rubs James’s back gently, “this will be the last time you must look upon one.”

“All right,” Tony says, and the whine of his repulsor charging up fills the hallway. “I’m blowing that thing straight to hell.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” James says.

Tony enters the room and the others take a step back; a moment full of blue light passes and the chair is reduced to slag and leather bits. Then Natasha enters the room with him and the two of them go to work on the computer.

Sam raises an eyebrow at Darcy. “Still not dealing well with it?” he asks.

Darcy shakes her head. “I can’t even get close to one, much less hook up to it. It’s all right; Natasha’s pretty good with computers if she does say so herself.”

“I heard that,” Natasha calls from inside the room, and Darcy chortles.

“Pretty sure you were meant to,” Clint calls back to her, and Natasha gives them both the finger.

A few minutes later, Tony steps back from the computers and waits for Natasha to leave the room before giving them the same treatment he gave to the chair. The room is full of nothing but the smallest bits of junk when the Avengers leave it – just in time for Natasha to get a call from Sharon, who has led a cohort of FBI and NSA agents into the building.

“Yeah, twelfth floor,” Natasha tells her. “Look for the giant HYDRA logo on the floor.”

A few minutes later, Sharon and the lead FBI agent are standing in front of the giant symbol. “You weren’t kidding,” Sharon says.

“I never kid about HYDRA,” Natasha replies. “Or donuts.”

“She _really_ does not kid about donuts,” Sam agrees.

Thor laughs softly. “Indeed. Natasha is _most _serious about them.”

“More so even than me,” Tony agrees. “And I am pretty serious about donuts.”

“Are we done with the donuts yet?” James asks. “Because there’s a bunch of HYDRA techs and scientists back here that need to be, you know, arrested.”

Not at all chastened, the Avengers split up again and lead small teams of agents into the rooms where the techs and scientists have been corralled. The arrests in that section begin, and through Sharon’s comms they can hear reports coming in from other agents that have spread through the building: there are more arrests happening in other parts of the building.

“Poor Justin Hammer,” Tony says, patently insincere. “This is _really_ gonna tank his stock prices.”

~*~

**April 2014**

**New York, NY**

The party that night in Avengers Tower is a small and exclusive one: Avengers and adjacents only. There is no dark dance floor, only slightly dimmed lights; there is no heavy beat of music, only a hilariously bad movie and the sounds of a group of friends cheerfully heckling it.

There are no crises left to be averted. The raid on Hammer’s Seattle location was so successful that there will probably be more raids on the LA location and possibly, with the help of Interpol, a couple of their factories overseas. These will be led by groups other than the Avengers. Tony is still gloating over the economic ruin of Justin Hammer; the others are mostly just glad to have cut another head off the HYDRA and cauterized the neck.

Darcy is cuddled against James on one of the plush love seats; his arm is around her shoulders, and they’re sharing a bowl of kettle corn. He leans down to drop an absent kiss on the top of her head, and she smiles, tilting her face up for another one. “Another successful venture,” she murmurs.

“Can’t complain,” James replies, nodding. “Well, I can – I could do without this much excitement.”

She laughs softly. “I think we’ve earned some quiet time,” she says. “Want to go on another vacation? I can let you look at me in a bikini some more.”

“кукла,” he says, “I will never turn down the opportunity to look at you in a bikini.”

“Get a room,” Clint commands from the floor in front of them, where he and Steve are sprawled, engaged in a furious tic tac toe tournament on the back of a newspaper.

Darcy leans down and nudges Clint’s foot with her toe. “Don’t be a jerk.”

“Talking over the movie,” Sam complains.

“Sorry,” Clint and Darcy chorus. Darcy snuggles back into James a little tighter, turning her attention to the movie.

Sometime later, she wakes to James shaking her shoulder. “Hey, Darce,” he murmurs. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Good idea.” She sits up and stretches, reaching for the television remote. The 11:00 news is on, and the announcer is saying something about a new Secretary of State called Ross, but Darcy doesn’t care. She shuts the TV off and stretches again.

The others have mostly scattered; Bruce, who passed on the festivities of the day in favor of not letting the Other Guy run amok in a building full of potential innocents, is asleep in one of the armchairs and Sam is dozing on the couch, but everyone else has gone to their respective places.

James takes Darcy’s hands and pulls her to her feet, wrapping his arm around her as they head toward the elevator. Once inside, she leans against him, closing her eyes again. “Love you, Chefchen,” she murmurs against his shoulder blade.

“Love you too, my кукла,” he murmurs back. He leads her, half-asleep, from the elevator into their apartment and then to their bedroom, where he efficiently strips her down and guides her into the bed. He strips down himself and climbs in on the other side.

She curls up against him, murmuring something softly, and he runs a hand over her hair, shushing her. Once she’s settled, he closes his own eyes, and the moon shines in through the window as they sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The most frequently asked question I get about this story is about the endearment "Chefchen." It's a mashup of the German word "chef" meaning boss and "chen" which is a diminutive. It's basically a cutesy way of Darcy calling James "Bossman" as an endearment.


End file.
